


Letters From Ganymede

by DictionaryWrites, Johannes_Evans



Series: Magic Beholden [9]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: 19th Century, Complicated Relationships, Desperation, Dracula Influence/References, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, Emotionally Repressed, Epistolary, Gay, Gods, Gothic, Gothic Romance, Horror, Isolation, Letters, Loneliness, M/M, Masturbation, Nightmares, Objectification, Power Dynamics, Psychological Horror, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Self-Esteem Issues, Skin Hunger, Slow Burn, Torture, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:15:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26501242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johannes_Evans/pseuds/Johannes_Evans
Summary: Ganymede Cavendish, a recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Arts, catches the eye of an anonymous benefactor.Mr Smith will offer Mr Cavendish food and board, all the artistic supplies he might require, and space with which to work: they shall never meet, and Mr Cavendish will never know Mr Smith's true name. The only recompense he desires is that Mr Cavendish create beautiful art, and that he write his sponsor a letter each week, keeping his benefactor apprised of his progress.Having always been lonely, but now feeling alone, Ganymede begins a slow descent into madness.An extremely gay reinterpretation of Daddy Long Legs, with heavy inspiration from Dracula and the Picture of Dorian Gray.
Relationships: Hades/Persephone, Naive Young Artist Isolated From The World/Mysterious and Anonymous Benefactor
Series: Magic Beholden [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1844758
Comments: 28
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

Tuesday 11th July, 1876

Dear Mr Smith,

I should like first to offer my apologies for not having written to you sooner, for I know part of the circumstances of our agreement are that I write you each week I avail of your sponsorship, and certainly the week begins anew each Sunday, so I am overdue.

Of course, I must thank you again for your kindness: I am sure I quite embarrassed you with my initial response to your letter, gushing over as I did with praise for your charity and your person, no matter the extenuating terms, but even some weeks later I feel no less overcome by my gratitude, nor indeed my admiration of my benefactor, anonymous as he might be.

I had thought the journey would take but two days, but instead it took four: the first mischief that became the coach you sent to convey me was a sudden snap of one of the front wheels’ spokes, making the whole of the carriage tilt abruptly to one corner, spooking the horses. This was on a long, empty road some hours north of Birmingham, and once the driver, Mr Thornwell, had calmed the horses from their frenzy, I had to ride on to the nearest inn some forty minutes’ further on, that I might send someone back to assist him.

I confess, Mr Smith, I am extremely uncomfortable on a horse’s back, but Mr Thornwell disliked very strongly the idea that I should remain alone with the coach itself on such an isolated road, and luckily, when I arrived at the inn they had expected us, and readily sent a young man off with another wheel to assist Mr Thornwell forth.

By the time all this business had been completed, of course, five or six hours had passed, and we had lost the warmth of the day and would, in some hours, lose its heat as well: although summer yet gives us some bountiful sun, Mr Thornwell reluctantly advised that we should stay the night in the inn rather than merely lunching there, as had been the original intention, and we took a room together.

He is a very interesting gentleman, Samuel Thornwell – I was so very enthusiastic in rushing about to pack my things into his coach that I kept stumbling on the uneven step outside my previous lodgings, and he insisted – most gallantly – upon assisting me in packing all of it away, and was very quick indeed with a joke. I don’t know that you have ever met him, Mr Smith, for he had informed me his services had been requisitioned by letter alone by a gentleman bearing your name, and that he had no previous knowledge of you, but that payment had been given up-front.

In this case, perhaps I ought describe him to you – Mr Thornwell is a handsome fellow, a little below six feet in height, and although he looks at a glance to be quite the square and serious sort (his beard is certainly quite serious, and kept as keenly in check as I would only imagine the beard of a groundskeeper in command of neat hedges), he smiles very freely, and was quick with all manner of joke and pun as we packed away my things.

On the first night we spent together, I had been quite focused upon some sketches of the cities and towns and landscapes through which we had passed, and sat upon the floor of the inn and worked like a demon with my chalks, focused most fervently upon my work that I should recreate all the sights I had seen before they dripped out of my head like so much overflowing water. Undeterred by the acute concentration with which I devoted myself to my work, Mr Thornwell spoke very freely, with a great manner of charm and gregarious spirit, to our hosts in the inn, and when they went away, he spoke for my benefit, although I said very little in response to many of his anecdotes, and merely laughed and smiled along with them.

Mr Thornwell informed me that he was in possession of a wife and three children, of whom he was very proud indeed, and that in his free time he and his eldest son, Sam, spent a good deal of time focused upon philately, which he informed me is the study – and often, the collection – of postage stamps. It seemed to me at the time to be quite a queer hobby, but Mr Thornwell spoke very well on it, and with a great deal of enthusiasm about the different varieties of postage stamps and their designs, and he said a good deal of the enjoyment in receiving letters themselves was in the postage affixed. Strange indeed, but there is naught that creates such light in the world as another man’s unfamiliar passions.

On the second night, in this inn we had not intended to stay at, I was not quite so plagued by a need to note down every sight I had taken in that day, and once I had penned a few sketches of the fields I had observed on our way, we sat together beside the hearth in the inn.

“I must apologise for my laconism last night,” I said, sipping at my ale and looking at my companion, the handsome planes of his face lit by the glow of light beside us. The only light in the room came from the fire, with the rest of the candles dimmed, and I leaned in toward it, for the night was rather cool. “I have only a little while to really capture the details I want in scenes before they begin to fade from my recollection, and I saw a good deal of beauty in our journey, and wished very much to sketch it down.”

“Oh, I took no offence in it,” he said mildly, with a wave of one hand. “You are of an artistic temperament, I can see, and your art is quite important to you, no doubt.”

“Oh, yes, yes, quite.”

“Is that the reason,” he asked, suddenly curious, “that you are travelling so far north? Heatherton is so small a village it is not even upon maps – when we reach the last inn on our journey, we are to ask directions from our host there, that I might ferry you further on.”

I had not known this, and was quiet for a moment, gazing into the fire. I was quite curious about Heatherton, for in your initial correspondence it was communicated to me as but a modest settlement overlooking a bay, and I was excited indeed to see it, as I am to see any new place of mystery. I am not, Mr Smith, well-travelled – until now, I have never left London.

Misinterpreting my silence, Mr Thornwell said swiftly, “Please, I did not mean to pry into your affairs – merely that this is an errand quite odd, and quite unlike any I have pursued heretofore. I ought have kept my questions to myself.”

“Oh, please, Mr Thornwell, you have caused no offence,” I assured him softly. “John Smith – the gentleman from whom you received the request for your services – is my benefactor. I have just completed a course of schooling in the arts at the Royal Academy, and Mr Smith, having observed the exhibition of my work in the years I have been a student, wrote to me some weeks ago and offered to sponsor me in further artistic pursuit.

“He suggested that I should take my place at his home in Heatherton that I might be free to concentrate upon my work without the distraction of the city’s bustle – and has offered, most graciously, this sponsorship and space to work, although we have never been acquainted before now.”

Mr Thornwell observed me with fascination, his lips pursed loosely together, his brow furrowed very deeply, that several lines appeared in the surface of his forehead. “Indeed?” he asked, leaning toward me. “Is he very rich, this Mr Smith?”

“I suppose,” I said, although the question offset me, for I have long been taught it is impolite to discuss such matters. “Certainly, it strikes me that he is very kind, and evidently, a great supporter of the arts. My tutors informed me that the Academy has received donations previously from Mr Smith, and knew him to be quite devoted to his support of the arts in all their forms.”

“Hm,” Mr Thornwell said. “And he sponsors individual artists, also?”

“If he has done so before, it has not been another member of the Royal Academy,” I said quietly, with a delicate shrug of my shoulders. “But his donations to the institution go back over a decade – I have no doubt in his support.”

“For how long will you stay in Heatherton?”

“Oh, a year, perhaps two. My medium is sculpture, and I work in marble – it is my intention to sculpt a representation of the Titaness Euryphaessa, the wife of Hyperion, with her three children in orbit of her: Helios, Selene, and Eos.”

My companion looked at me somewhat blankly for a moment, and then said, with perhaps manufactured brightness, “You are a Michelangelo, then?”

I flushed with embarrassment, feeling the heat burn in my blushing cheeks, for it was a painfully lofty association – though I know that it is true that many people might not know another sculptor in existence. “Not hardly,” I said hurriedly. “I could never hope to match such skill in any mode of art, but like him, I do sculpt in marble.”

“It must be very expensive, stone like that,” he said, with a low whistle. “He won’t make you quarry it yourself, I hope? I mean not to impugn your strengths, Mr Cavendish, but you hardly seem fit for such work as that.”

I laughed, and shook my head. “I do not believe he plans to put me to such labour as that, Mr Thornwell, no. He shall provide me a workspace and materials, room and board, and a small stipend as recompense for my work, as though he is not already giving me enough.”

“All that,” said Mr Thornwell wonderingly, “for one sculpture? That is all the recompense your Mr Smith demands?”

“Well, I shall produce other works of art, in my placement here,” I said, feeling quite embarrassed for reasons I did not – and still do not know – how to put into words. “I shall paint, I expect, but being a finer sculptor than I am a painter, I shall no doubt create smaller sculptures, too – there are beautiful things to be wrought in clay or wood, as well as marble.” Mr Thornwell did not seem convinced, and thus I added, almost blurted out, “And, of course, Mr Smith asks that I should send him correspondence.”

Mr Thornwell regarded me in bafflement. “Correspondence?” he repeated.

“I am to write to Mr Smith once a week, informing him of my progress, and to tell him of my moods and my experiences in the week having passed. He will never reply to me, he informs me, but it is important to him I should write to him, that he knows I am taking seriously the terms of his sponsorship.”

“Rich and lonely,” said Mr Thornwell – pray, Mr Smith, do forgive him – and I gasped.

“Mr _Thornwell_ ,” I chided him. “It is not so uncommon that a young man should send his sponsor reports upon his progress.”

“Perhaps,” said he, “but queer indeed that he should not reply to them. You say you have never met him?”

“Never – and Mr Smith said in his first letter to me that I likely never shall. He is not an artist himself, he said to me: he appreciates artists.”

My hand, at this moment, slipped to my jacket pocket, and lingered over the point where your letter to me was folded therein: I hope it will not embarrass you, Mr Smith, to note that I have read that particular line of your letter to me ( _Mr Cavendish, I am no artist, nor am I a poet, nor anything else. I have never and will never create anything, except love and enthusiasm for the artist, that heavenly being that serves as our modern Creator.)_ some thousand times since I first received it.

“You are young,” said Mr Thornwell musingly, “and quite beautiful. Being young you have sufficient energy to take on even the most exhausting projects; being beautiful, you understand beauty, and are thus well-poised to create it.”

I was silent, for this praise embarrassed me, and seeing this, Mr Thornwell took pity on me, and we retired to bed.

The next day, being as the weather was milder, the sun hidden behind thick cloud, he invited me to sit at the front of the cab with him – although I was no longer enclosed by the walls of the coach, sitting very close beside Mr Thornwell, I was able to benefit from his warmth, and our conversation kept me quite occupied as he travelled on.

We came to the inn where he had been advised we should be able to take direction to the village of Heatherton. The previous two inns, the Duck and Feather and the Coach and Horses had been venerable old pubs, very warm within and quite homey: this establishment, the Stone Post, was colder, and our hosts there were not nearly so sociable. I did not hear the name of our hostess, but that she was the sister of our host, but I knew his name to be Jude, and he never gave me his surname.

He and his sister surprised me, when first I saw them, because they almost seemed to be statues brought to life: both Jude and his sister were pale as white marble, with exaggerated emphasis in the shapes of their features. Each had heavily lidded eyes, carefully crafted lips, fine bone structure, and they moved as though some invisible conductor was coaching them through the ballet of their life, silent and effortlessly graceful.

I did not see Jude or his sister smile once: they were each possessed of a silent, frowning stare that made one take pause. Jude is, I would estimate, of the same age as me, somewhere about the region of twenty-five, and his sister somewhat younger, but he did not speak to me as much of a peer.

He scarcely spoke at all.

Leading me up the stair, he brought me to the room I was to take lodging in that night, a very large room that even then seemed quite cold, and I suggested that myself and Mr Thornwell might share a room together rather than being given separate lodgings, for it looked very cold indeed, and Jude gave me such a strange look that I felt very wrong for asking, and then fell silent.

Dinner was a quiet affair, and I tossed and turned the night through in the cold room, but when I went out into the corridor I saw no evidence of Mr Thornwell or our two hosts, and there were no other guests at the Stone Post that I knew of, and I quickly retired back to bed, for the corridor was even cooler than my bedroom. It occurred to me that it was quite strange that the only owners of the establishment should be two people so very young and seemingly so opposed to human contact, and as I turned this thought over in my mind, the most lurid of theatres playing out in my mind, as so often happens – of them perhaps being tragically orphaned, or something similar.

I slept, then.

In the morning, I was very sorry to hear that Mr Thornwell had been taken ill, suddenly caught with a fever, and as Jude’s sister attended him, Jude said to me, with a sort of quiet, grim determination, that he would take the coach forth to Heatherton in his stead.

I objected, of course, for I was worried indeed that my new friend should be so ill, and begged that I should be able to sit with him or even just check in on him, but the Stone Post siblings were vehement I shouldn’t go anywhere near him, lest I suffer the same fever he was afflicted with.

I quite forgot myself, so distracted was I as we came out to the coach, the horses already having been hitched in place, that I nearly climbed up to sit before the cab with Jude – never has a man looked at me so severely, and I felt almost as if Jude had struck me a blow with his eyes alone. They are such a funny colour, Mr Smith, a sort of brown that is so light as to be very near to gold, and they invoked in me a feeling most uncanny.

It was some hours travel to Heatherton in the coach from the Stone Post, as I’m sure you know, and yet despite how keen I was to look out of the window and make a note of the journey, particularly with how overcome with concern I was for Mr Thornwell’s good health, I fell fast asleep. I could not say how it slipped over me, for it caught me by certain surprise, but I suppose that exhaustion does these things to a man, no matter his pressing concerns.

When I woke, bleary eyed and disoriented, still in a somnolent haze, Jude was standing silently at the cab’s open door beside me, staring up at me. My luggage had already been packed away inside.

“You are very kind,” I said as I noted that my travelling chest and boxes of materials had already disappeared from the back of the coach, and Jude followed my gaze, looking, impassively, to the coach’s trunk, where all my things had been neatly tied before we had set out.

“Wasn’t me,” Jude said, and climbed back into the cab, taking up the horse’s reins. Before I could so much as say another word, he was riding off, and I was left in the yard of the house, alone, with my coat very loose about my shoulders and my carrying case held limply in my hand.

Left alone in the front yard of the house in Heatherton, I looked about at the stone walls, the half-open stable empty of horse or goat, the shed piled high with firewood. The house itself surprised me in its size – I confess, Mr Smith, when you had offered me lodgings, I expected somewhere quite modest, perhaps with a wider space to make into my studio, but it seemed to me to be almost like a manor. It was some storeys higher even than some of the buildings I worked in at the Royal Academy, and very wide indeed – the orphanage in which I grew up was quite a small one, and I have never really had cause to visit anyone else’s home.

The door was ajar, a key in the lock, and I took it loosely from its keyhole, stepping into the house proper, and closing the door behind me, putting the key in my pocket.

The lamps within were already lit where needed, although a fair bit of daylight was still coming in through the windows, and waiting for me upon the end table in the hall, where there was a case waiting for some calling cards – and the idea itself quite delighted me, for I have never been called on before – was a note.

_Dear Mr Cavendish,_

_Your luggage has been placed in your bedroom, which is south-facing on the third floor, that you might have a pleasant view of the bay below. Mr Smith has advised us that this would likely be your preference, but that if you desire, you ought select any of the other bedrooms which brings you the most pleasure._

_The supplies and equipment you have brought with you have been placed in your studio, which is also on the southside of the building, and can be accessed from the ground or first floor._

_Other locations of note ought be the master bath, which is on the third floor, in the room adjoining the master bedroom; the library, which is on the second floor; and the dining room, which is on the ground floor, in the second door ahead of you on your right._

_Mr Smith has advised that you are to explore and make use of the house at your leisure, and that while you reside here, you are to consider yourself its master._

_Dinner will be served at seven o’clock this evening in the dining room; you might take what you please from the kitchen and its pantry that adjoins it._

_Welcome to Mnemosyne’s Rest._

There was no signature upon the note, though I presume it was from the house’s staff – which, again, surprised me, for I had no idea I would have staff attending to me, and I confess, the idea made me quite giddy and uncertain. Perhaps you will think me very foolish, Mr Smith, but I have really only ever read about households with servants in novels, or heard about them in conversation, and it never really occurred to me that I should ever avail of such services.

When my father died, I was left a small apartment in London, which I inherited upon reaching my age of majority, and I have lived there alone throughout my education at the Royal Academy. In the orphanage, all we boys slept in one room together, ordinarily between ten and twelve of us, and I confess, it was a great relief when I became a man and was able to live alone, without so many breathing mouths creating such a racket all around me, and yet—

Perhaps you will think this very strange indeed, Mr Smith, I do not know, but I have always found the idea of living with servants, when one is a fellow without family or attachment, to be one as comforting as it is mysterious – surely, it would be a balm to any lonely man, to know that there are others living in the house in which he rests?

Perhaps I am a fool, I do not know. No one has ever told me so – but then, perhaps I am so foolish everyone I have ever met has thought it quite obvious, and not thought it worth saying.

I hope I do not bore you.

I know in your letter you requested that I should treat these letters as a diary to you, or perhaps as a confessional, and pour fourth my soul, but I have never kept a diary before, and I am not a Catholic, and to be very honest indeed with you, Mr Smith, I do not know that I am in possession of a soul at all. They seem to be allocated to the most interesting of people, and I am no such thing.

Once more, I must thank you for your kindness – I was a man quite uncertain of my bearings, when my graduation from the academy loomed, uncertain as to where next I should go, and you have given me not only your sponsorship or your kindness, but a sense of purpose I might not have gotten, otherwise.

And— Pray, Mr Smith, do forgive me if I overstep my bounds, or if I speak too freely, or if every letter I pen to you is quite a lot of nonsense. I have never written to anybody before, and but for schooling exercises as a youth, the practice is one quite foreign to me. Perhaps I thought thank you for this addition to my experience of the world, as well?

I have not yet conducted my exploration of Mnemosyne’s Rest – oh, what a name, Mr Smith, I wonder if it was you that named it? – for as soon as I came into my bedroom, the south-facing one – and you were correct in your estimations, Mr Smith, the wide windows create such a beautiful view of the bay below, with its grey-and-white cut waters, and its view of the cliffs, and its picturesque, dark-sanded beaches, and I should never want any bedroom other than this one – I sat down at my desk to pen this missive to you, that you should not think I was ignoring my obligations to you.

Thank you.

Once this letter is finished, and I have let the ink to dry, I shall send it off to you post-haste – and perhaps this evening, I shall pen another letter to the Stone Post, asking for news of Mr Thornwell’s condition… Ah. But that is a thought for later.

Yours with gratitude overflowing,

Ganymede Cavendish


	2. Friday 14th July, 1876

Dear Mr Smith,

What a house this is.

I feel you shall become swiftly bored of me indeed if every letter I send you is one replete with my thanks, but I must, alas, thank you once more: I have spent this week exploring Mnemosyne’s Rest over and over, and still I feel I scarcely know her, for she seems to go on very nearly forever. You know, today, this morning, actually, I stepped out into the yard fixed for a walk into the village, for it is a very pleasant day, exceedingly warm and not at all windy, and I thought to step about the house on all sides.

I thought, you know, that I should count all the rooms I knew of and where they were, and count out my steps – you might think this to be a very queer thing for a young man to do, but I used to do it when I was a young man still learning his proportions, particularly when I was thinking about the architecture of some complex building or other. So, with my hands upon my hips, I counted out my steps along the eastern wall – I counted out the salon, and the reading room beside it, the hall, the coat room, the scullery— and, you know, Mr Smith, it seemed like I had such a lot of wall yet to fill up, and I knew not what to fill it with. When I stepped along the north wall, it was quite the opposite – moving along my boundary, counting out my steps, I felt as though I must be losing my count or exaggerating my steps, for it seemed impossible that the rooms on the ground floor or any of the others should fit along its length, so great and lofty as they seem in my estimation, and yet—

Well.

For all the rooms as I was counting them to fit along the northside of the house, the house would have to be nearly twice as long, and for them to fit along the east side, it should be half as much. Evidently, I am losing track of my numbers, or falling prey to some optical illusion – a shame indeed, for a supposed artist!

In any case, after I penned to you my last letter, and left the paper to dry, I stood to explore. The servants – and I did presume them to be numerous, or at least more than one in their number, for their note had said _us_ – had placed my travelling trunk at the base of my bed, on top of the ottoman, and for the time being I left it there.

I had become almost dizzy climbing the stairs to the third floor, for the flight of stairs is really quite narrowly made, although the bannisters are exquisitely lacquered and so delightfully smooth under one’s palm – I feel I shall become very hale and fit, climbing and descending these stairs every day. I noticed on the third floor that the staircase went up another floor, but I did not immediately explore this further: instead, I stepped into the master bath…

What _luxury_ is in this house, Mr Smith. Have you lived here before, I wonder, perhaps in your youth? Did you, too, first step within this great room, with its strangely warm black tiles covering the floor and creeping halfway up the wall, before they give way to peach-coloured paint? Did you, as I did, step slowly within and startle at the echo of your own footsteps, staring at the great bathtub in the room’s centre, with its polished white porcelain, its shining silver legs and taps? Did you, after a cursory glance about as though for someone who might witness one’s indignity, fall into its dry bed, still clothed and booted, and gasp at the sight of the ceiling?

Mr Smith, I don’t believe even Michelangelo himself had a ceiling like that in his bathroom.

Lying back in the bath, feeling as though I could nearly swim in it, I stared up at the ceiling with my mouth agape, a fish twice over: I stared with delighted awe at the thick, painted clouds and sun-streamed skies, at the way that the clouds were tinged pink and gold by the slight of the setting sun, not depicted in the mural except by evidence of its presence.

In the orphanage, we were very lucky indeed, for we had two bathtubs piped in, but they were very small tubs in a very cold and draughty room down the corridor from the bedroom, and in winter, sometimes one had to smack the taps a few times to dislodge the ice that gathered in them, blocking the pipes.

This bath— Well, suffice it to say, this bath seemed some ways beyond the bounds of luxury. I could barely even imagine bathing in it, lying ensconced in hot water, and in the comfort of such a lovely room…

I don’t know how much of your own house I ought describe to you – were this my diary, I believe I should write down every detail, but surely, if Mnemosyne’s Rest is yours, you must know her every detail?

And yet, sitting down to write down my thoughts to you, Mr Smith, I feel compelled to note down very nearly every one – the bathroom has a high window to let in light, too low to look out of, and as well as the flushing toilet, there is a screen behind which to dress, with a small table to fix one’s hair or such, with a mirror. The screen keeps the mirror cordoned off, I am glad to say – I think I should feel quite revealed in the bath, to bathe before a mirror, no matter that my only watcher would be me.

The bathroom explored, I stepped about the second floor and examined a few of the other rooms – some bedrooms, of course, made fresh and ready as though waiting for a new guest at any moment, but other rooms, too: there were two sitting rooms, or perhaps offices, with writing desks and sofas and such forth, and then there were a few rooms with furniture and boxes with neat white clothes over them, to keep them safe from dust as they went unused.

The servants had told me that the library was on the second floor, but it seemed to me more accurate to say that the second floor _was_ the library. I stepped very slowly out from the stairs, my lips parted in wonder, as I looked at the rows and rows of shelves that seemed to go out in all directions, and for a time, I wandered between them as a child in a new place. There seemed to be books of all descriptions, all kinds, some with leather binding, others bound in cloth and card, others still that had no binding at all, and rested on the shelves in paper tied with string; I saw Greek and English and Latin and French and Russian and Chinese and Sanskrit and a great many scripts beside, seemingly laid out by subject, and to the north side of the great library, in a comfortable little reading nook with a bench outside the window, was something spectacular.

Did you commission this, Mr Smith, or was it perhaps some wondrous heirloom?

Some six feet across was a great table, and in the midst of it, spinning upon some tremendous axis that let it move all the way about, was a globe painted with the world’s map. Never in my years have I seen such a lovely rendition of that cartography: as I reached out, touching the great, carved globe, it struck me as slightly wet to the touch – I believe the bowl beneath the table was filled with water, to allow it to move so smoothly – and I felt beneath my fingers the smoothly hewn surface of Russia’s outstretched plains, and then touched over China, India…

I know not how to convey to you, Mr Smith, the oddity of the sensation that awaited me, touching the places where the globe was painted blue, to better depict the seas rendered there. It was not that I felt my fingers would sink beneath those carefully painted seas, with their marked straits or the occasional white curve of a choppy surface – I think were it that, I might have been able to brush off the sensation as naught more than some fancy of my imagination.

Instead of that, I felt—

Well.

I felt dread.

I have never been to the seaside – I believe I conveyed to you in our last correspondence, Mr Smith, that I have never been outside of London, except for perhaps before my father died, but I was scarce six at the time of that unhappy occasion, and I do not recall at all aught that came before it – and while the ocean quite enchants me, so impossibly infinite and beauty is she as a subject, I feel I should be very happy to paddle at her babbling shores or dance within the sand, but not to swim out.

There is something wholly unnatural, I feel, or something that _would_ be unnatural, in a gentleman swimming out into the sea, that depths unknown should span beneath him – by our very nature as walking, breathing creates of the Earth, it is beyond us to dive very deeply before we must rise to the surface to take in a new breath, and even were our lungs no obstacle, water so obscures the natural reach of the sun’s light that unless the water was supremely clear, one would soon be swimming in darkness. When one swims upon the surface of the water with any sort of depth beneath, one submits oneself to the mercies of whatever might lurk beneath. Do you know what it is I mean? When one swims upon the surface of water outside of some little pool – or, I suppose, even within a pool, if it is very deep – one offers oneself for whatever might see us, knowing that we cannot see it.

It felt like that, Mr Smith.

As I traced my fingers over the painted rendition of Gaia’s seas, I felt vulnerable, somehow, as though I was at risk of being swiftly devoured by something unseen.

I withdrew my hand, and wiped it on my handkerchief. The library I left for another day.

The studio was beautiful again – I have never been in such a wonderful sunroom, with two floors to it, and I must have already sketched it a dozen times over, the sort of balcony about the edge of the room, the suspended walkway, and then that dastardly spiral staircase back to the ground floor… Oh, Mr Smith, I have never felt quite so at home in a studio as I do in that sunroom. The sun comes in and is warmed so sweetly by the glass windows and the ceiling, and it’s so delightfully warm—

I set myself about unpacking more of my supplies, setting them into their places about the workspace, within the drawers and about the working desk, and also within a contained cupboard to the edge of the room, for that which needs to be sheltered from the sun’s glare, rather like an artist’s pantry.

By the time I was finished putting my equipment away, as well as filing the sketches I had done of my journey here, it was some time past seven, and I rushed about quite ridiculously in search of the dining hall, but I found it.

Beneath a silver cloche was my meal, a beautifully prepared breast of duck, parsnips and carrots, potatoes… It was a very lovely meal, but I confess I found myself disappointed: I did not expect company, but I had hoped to perhaps meet the servants at Mnemosyne’s House, or even one of them, and yet when I looked into the kitchen that attached to the dining room, I found no sign of anybody. I left a note beside my plate, in absence of someone to thank by mouth, thanking my chef for such a beautifully prepared meal – it seemed to me unlikely that I should see any of the servants, that perhaps they dipped into the house for their duties and then rushed away again, that I should not catch sight of them, nor see evidence of their presence.

Except, of course, when I retired to bed, I found that my trunk had been unpacked, my clothes set neatly in the armoire and in the drawers there, my personal effects laid out on the vanity and the desk respectively.

In any case, I undressed for bed, and I meant – I promise you – to stay up for some while and draw, but alas, I did not. I penned a letter asking after Mr Thornwell’s health, addressed to the Stone Post, and then I left it to dry as I retired to bed.

Mr Smith, in my twenty-two years, I have lain in a good many beds, but never has any of them been so comfortable as this one. As I drew back the coverlet and slipped myself beneath it, I sighed at the heavy softness of the duvet and the warmed sheets beneath – the servants _must_ have placed a warming pan and removed it before I retired – and when my head hit the pillow, I felt as though I were Icarus, putting my head against a cloud.

I was so terribly comfortable that I fell asleep immediately, and my dreams were very pleasant, but swiftly forgotten when I woke again. I lay abed in a sort of haze, so comfortable I scarcely felt equipped to move, basking like a cat in the golden light that filtered in through the open curtains, pouring over me like something molten and lovely.

At some point – the morning is blurry and bleary in my recollection, as some mornings are – I turned my head, I saw the tray on the end table beside me, with breakfast waiting on it.

I jumped awake, startled, reaching out to touch the cloche, which was still warm beneath my fingers, and the mug of tea, which was still steaming with heat; I then recalled that the curtains had been closed when I had come to bed, and that someone must have opened them, presumably when they brought in the tray.

As I rubbed sleepily at my eyes, despairing for the mussed state of my hair, I wondered how I could not have noticed whatever valet or butler had slipped inside, and yet I felt so incredibly well-rested, with that supple, deliciously pleasurable haze that sometimes lingers after a good sleep, that I didn’t find it within myself to dwell on it overlong.

Breakfast was eggs and bacon and toast and these splendid tomatoes that had been roasted very finely, so it was one pleasure after another.

Another note from the servants was set on a card beside my plate – it was a very fine hand, I think I should note, with smooth, sweeping motions of the ink upon the page, with a sort of copperplate lettering that was so legible as to almost be type – and I picked it up to examine.

_Dear Mr Cavendish,_

_There are stamps in the drawer of the end table beside the front door. There is a post office in the village, but you are welcome to leave outgoing letters in the postage drawer also, and we shall take it to post each morning._

_Your marble will be delivered come Monday._

Again, there was no signature.

I mused on this as I rose to dress, because I don’t know that it is ordinary for servants to sign the notes that they leave – but with that said, Mr Smith, I don’t know that it is ordinary for servants to leave notes at all. In any case, it seemed to be no matter of great priority, and so I took my letters to you and to Mr Thornwell and set them into envelopes, affixing their postage before putting on my cloak and my boots, to walk into the village. I brought down the breakfast tray myself, although I was somewhat unsteady with it on the narrow stairwell, and I’m sure there must be some other stairwell that makes such things easier, or perhaps a dumbwaiter, but I have not yet discovered either even now.

Having set the tray in the pantry, and keeping the key to Mnemosyne’s Rest in my pocket with my coin purse and the letters I had to send off, I made my way into the village.

As I told you before, I fell quite asleep on the journey between the Stone Post and the house, and was scarcely cognizant of anything that passed by the window, but I feel that Jules couldn’t have led the coach through the village when he brought me home, for the village is down about the bay, or, perhaps it is a cove, I really don’t know the difference… In any case, with Mnemosyne’s Rest being on the very top of the cliff, overlooking it all, it had its own road, which I followed on, and when I reached a crossroads, I followed the path down to the village itself – the other one, I expected, led back toward the Stone Post, although it looked to move through a very imposing grove of trees first…

I made a mental note to search for some manner of map in the library or in the village, and it was at this point that it occurred to me, amusingly enough, that I had seen no signpost for the village, nor the house, nor anything else. I had followed the road some twenty minutes down the hill, with no arrows pointing anywhere at all.

The path down to Heatherton was not very steep, although it was a sharp incline down from the cliff’s top: to accommodate a gentler walk, it meandered one way and the other, like the streak a snake leaves in the sands behind it. I almost felt dizzy with it by the time I came to the bottom, and for a moment I stood still, leaned against the little wall that bordered the last of the path’s curves, and looked at the village ahead of me.

Have you spent much time in Heatherton, Mr Smith?

As I walked down the path and into the village proper, I found the houses to be very quaint: most of them were built of neatly-stacked white brick, many of them with black-tiled rooves. The post office was marked with a black sign-post, painted with white titling, but its door was closed, and when I pressed on the door handle, it didn’t budge. I glanced about for some sign of its opening hours, but I saw none. The only messaging printed was over a letter box to the side, which stated in neatly printed text that letters were collected for delivery every evening at six o’clock.

The post office was closed, and all of the houses had their doors closed, many of them dark or with their windows closed. When I walked further into the village, I saw that there was a small green grocer’s, its primary window boarded up. I stood in the centre of a quaint little square, with a few scattered benches here and there, and a broken fountain in its centre.

Along the beach front, I made out a few scattered chairs and tables, but despite the warmth of the day, no one was sitting at any of them. There was a public house overlooking them, but its door was closed – it was not yet even ten – so I walked past its door and sank slowly to sit down at one of the benches.

Looking back toward the village, I had the strange feeling that despite the warmth of the day and the brightness of the sun, scarce a single cloud in the sky, that Heatherton felt quite oppressively grey, as though the day were painfully overcast. Even the waters of the English Channel seemed to me to be strangely dark, although I knew they ought really be a sunnier grey, and I glanced at the shore and the dark yellow sand that the water came up to lap against. Further up the coast, toward the edge of the cove, I could see outcrops of stone that were no doubt filled with all manner of interesting rockpool, and I made a note to myself to perhaps examine what I found there, before summer began to drain away, but on that day, for reasons I cannot wholly describe, I did not feel ready to do so.

Instead, I sat in silence for quite some time, listening to the quiet breeze of the wind and listening to the regular rhythm of the waves against the sand, smelled the saltwater.

There was noise, of course, but—

But it felt so very peaceful, and so very quiet. I had not in all my life experienced such overwhelming peace, and it left me hypnotised.

I have noticed that, in the days since – on the first night I spent in Mnemosyne’s Rest, I think I must have been too tired to think much on it, but on every night since, I have noticed the incredible silence of the place, where I can hear naught at all. Even the clocks seem to run silently at night. Even in the flat I kept myself, in London, I have always heard the noise of the city about me – the creak of coach wheels and the sound of horse’s hooves; people laughing and walking in the streets; dogs barking and cats caterwauling.

There is none of that in Heatherton, nor about the house that overlooks it.

When I looked up from my reverie beside the sea, the sun had moved not insignificantly in the sky, and when I turned my head, I saw that the door to the public house was open. A large gentleman, broad and brawny and very plump, built like a sailor, was leaning in the doorway and idly polishing a glass, his gaze on me.

He had very square features, as though they had been allotted him at the canning factory, and though his moustache was somewhat bushy, he wore his dark hair slicked back with a good deal of brilliantine, and he had very light-coloured eyes, so much so that I could see their glint even from some distance away.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I did not see you.”

“What is the opposite of sorry?” He had a thick Scots accent, and I took a moment to assure myself I knew what it was he had said.

“I hardly know. Glad, I suppose.”

“Then I’m very glad,” he said. “I _did_ see you.”

And then he went inside again.

Mr Smith, it is not that I am stupid. I want to assure you of that – I have never thought of myself as being remarkably or even particularly intelligent, but I am not, I do not think, a fool. With that said, I am foolish enough – and I think that fair to say, for any man alive has some modicum of foolishness in him – that sometimes when a man says something very strange, I struggle to work out for myself whether it is deeply profound, or very stupid.

After a minute’s deliberation, I came to the conclusion that this exchange amounted to the latter.

Taking some uncertain steps toward the pub’s door, I lingered on its threshold, leaning forward to peer inside, and I looked about the room, at the scattered armchairs and stools, and the tables.

I had been in public houses before this moment, of course, but I have never really felt at home in them – I have always felt, somehow, as if I am trespassing in someone else’s domain. Do you know what it is that I mean? There are some places, Mr Smith, where a man just feels as though he doesn’t belong, and it isn’t as though anyone has ever told him so, but no one has ever told him the opposite, either.

Public houses often feel off-limits to me, but there are places besides that – sometimes, the other boys at the orphanage when I was but a child would insist on taking a shortcut through a churchyard, and I felt the same there, too. Even though I kept to the path, and never stepped into the grass or – gods forbid – walked over the graves themselves, I felt as though I were being observed, somehow, and that my watcher disapproved of my being in such a place.

I often feel as though I am being observed by some watcher unseen.

It is, at times, a very comforting idea; at other times, when pursuing the forbidden, it is, in its way, pleasurable, exciting… Other times, Mr Smith, it quite terrifies me in a way I hardly know how to bear.

I did not feel watched now, precisely.

I merely felt as though I didn’t belong.

“In the house up the hill, are you?” asked the publican, as he stepped behind the great bar, and I looked with fascination at the display behind the bar. There was far more wine than I would have expected – I would have been given to understand that the working man in the North of England would have preferred ale or cider over wine, but there were a great many bottles of wine displayed with their labels facing outward, along with the expected spirits. To one side, there were a few stacked barrels – kegs, I supposed – but they did not take to the forefront as I might have expected.

“Yes,” I said, and stepped inside, rolling my shoulders as a strange shiver ran down my spine. “In Mnemosyne’s Rest. You know it?”

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “Never been up to it.”

“You know its owner? Mr Smith?”

“Can’t say I do,” said the publican. The sink sloshed under his great hands as he washed some glasses, and I craned my head over the bar to watch where he set them to dry, placing them deftly and swiftly over a rack. “Not for me to know people like that. My name’s Si.”

“After Silenus?”

The publican gave me a very queer look, then, and when he frowned, his moustache shifted most amusingly, in mirror of the furrow of his eyebrows.

“Most guess Simon,” he said mildly. “But, yes.”

“I knew a boy called Silenus,” I said. “He is gone away to Ireland now – he oversees a silver mine.”

Silenus inclined his head, looking at me very thoughtfully. His eyes, I now surmised, were such a very pale green as to seem almost white from farther away, but up close, they were the colour of one’s paint water when one was painting a forest in water colours. “Where is it,” he asked, “that Mr Smith has brought you from?”

“London,” I said. “I am an artist – I sculpt.”

“He sponsors you?”

“Yes.”

Silenus looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Knew your father, did he?”

“I don’t believe so, but I could hardly say,” I said, discomfited by this mode of questioning. It seemed to me to be a very personal query coming from a stranger, and I rather resented it. “I wonder – do you know when the post office is open?”

Silenus blinked, as though the question were a surprise to him – or as though he had never known Heatherton to have a post office. “Is it open now?”

“No. Or— It wasn’t, earlier.”

“Then it is closed,” said Silenus, and shrugged his shoulders. “I expect it will be for some time.”

“And the grocer’s?”

“The grocer is gone away.”

“Are all the houses empty?”

“Not at all. Heatherton is quiet in the summer months, that is all. It comes alive in winter.”

“Oh,” I said. Perhaps my disappointment showed in my face, for Silenus looked at me very seriously, and then, as a man at theatre, straightened and gestured to the variety of bottles he had on display.

“A drink?”

“No, thank you. I must walk home.”

“Another time, then. You are very handsome, Mr Cavendish – you would be quite popular with the girls of Heatherton.”

I was pleased at the praise, of course, and I gave a small bow and a nod of my head before I stepped out. Heatherton village was just as oddly quiet as it had been when I initially walked through it, and the climb back up the hill to Mnemosyne’s Rest was a somewhat arduous one, so much so that when I returned, I ate the meal that had been left for me beneath a cloche in the dining hall, and thought to take a rest upon the chaise long in the studio, beneath the warm light of the sun.

Have you ever had a revelation, Mr Smith, that comes to you just before you fall asleep, but you are so much on the precipice between wakefulness and dreaming that although it comes and spreads itself in your consciousness in stark relief, you fall immediately asleep anyway?

That is the way in which I realised that I had never told Silenus my name.

I woke from my short repose in poor mood, and then remembered the oddity with Silenus, and brushed the thought aside with the assurance that I must merely have misremembered our encounter, or that perhaps he had seen my name written somewhere about my person.

I spent a few more hours, then, exploring the house, learning its curious geography, and in these past few days, Mr Smith, that is all that I have done – I have gone between walking the house and mapping it within my own head, and drawing a good deal down in the studio. There is a tremendous peace here, you know, basking in the light of the sun as I work, and although I initially felt some strange trepidation thinking of the village of Heatherton, being as it is a Friday evening, I am planning to take a hot bath as soon as these pages are completed and blotted, and then I shall go down into the village.

Come the winter months, I might ask for an escort to and fro, for I should think those paths get quite icy when the frost sets in, and I should hate to fall where no one might know where I am, but for now the weather is so very temperate, and the days are very long, that there is more than enough light to see by.

I confess, Mr Smith, I find in these letter such a sensation of liberation, in a way – if a diary is so freeing, when one keeps one, perhaps I ought have begun to keep one many years ago, and this is better than a diary, I think, for I have another man reading that which I say, and that makes me feel as though I have a sort of connection in the world, no matter that I pull on only one end of the rope, and that you are never to pull back.

I suppose that must sound very strange, but suffice it to say, I am grateful indeed at the idea that you might be—

Well, not watching over me, but you know, reading my letters, and approving of my art. Oh, I do hope you approve of my art, Mr Smith. I should feel quite sorry if you didn’t.

The bell is ringing, which I believe means my bath is run – I shall leave you here, Mr Smith.

Yours soon to be much the cleaner,

Ganymede Cavendish


	3. Tuesday 18th July, 1876

**Tuesday 18 th July, 1876**

Dear Mr Smith,

I do not recall asking for a bath to be run for me, you know.

I think I must have murmured my intentions aloud at some stage, or perhaps somehow made known my desires without meaning to, observed and not realising the fact, and at no point did I leave a note or some such for the servants. I had intended to run the bath myself.

Nevertheless, as I was writing my last letter to you, the bell rang in the bathroom, and when I stepped into the master bath, I found that my bath had indeed been run.

The scent of hyacinth hung sweet upon the air, not so heavy as to be oppressive, but only seductive, and for a moment I lingered in my slippers and my banyan, inhaling deeply the floral scent that greeted me, and then I stepped further forward. No servant had come through my room as I had been at my writing desk, and I stepped toward the door that led from the bath into the corridor, locking it with a quiet click of the key in the lock.

The bath was quite full, more than full enough that I should be fully submerged in it, and a handful of small, lilac petals had been scattered on the water’s surface – the hyacinth I could smell, no doubt taken from one of the many bottles of dried flowers shelved for the purpose of scenting a bath, which were neatly arranged in bright rows of colour upon one wall.

A rug had been rolled out beside the great bath, some sort of fur, and the stool from the vanity had been set beside it, with two towels and some soap stacked on its seat. When I stepped out of my slippers and onto the rug instead, I sighed without meaning to at the softness beneath my soles, and I knew that when I stepped from the bath, it would protect my feet from bite of the cold floors. What luxury.

I had heard no servant’s footstep, nor even heard the running water or the clatter of the pipes as my bath had been made ready for me, and looking about the bathroom even then, I saw no evidence that another soul had stepped foot inside: there were no fingerprints or marks of condensation upon the bath’s taps or edges, no scant drips of water on the floor or wet stains upon the rug, nor marks upon the towels. Even the bottles of flowers seemed untouched, not one of their number any less full than the rest, although one had been used this evening.

I saw only my bath, made fit for me as though I were some prince, or perhaps a priest to be made clean before his evening’s worship—

I could never be a priest, I do not think.

I have not the strength of being.

After a moment of gazing at the beautiful surface of the steaming water, the sight no doubt reminiscent of some long-forgotten hot springs cleaved into the side of ancient Olympus, I disrobed, and sank therein.

What heat, Mr Smith, and what a soothing balm was the water on my flesh – there were salts in the bath as well as the flowers, and I felt them hum against my skin, my eyes falling closed as I leaned slowly back into the water, sinking underneath its surface. A towel had been rolled and pinned against the head of the bath, that I might rest my head upon it, and I laid myself in the waters, and felt much at peace.

The weight of the water was impossible, and for some while – I know not how long – I lay there beneath it, feeling its kiss on my skin.

I have no doubt, Mr Smith, that at some point to come, I shall paddle in the sea that laps upon the shore at Heatherton, perhaps even roll up my trousers and step forth, that those small waves might run over the backs of my calves, my knees, even, but I would go no further. I don’t know that I could step upon a boat, for fear of what lurked beneath it, and to swim in open waters, I should surely die even to think of it. I spoke to you of my fear of the abyss, of the leviathan in it, and I fear I could never swim in the open sea lest I die from fright, but a bath, why—

What is a bath, Mr Smith, but a boat in perfect reverse?

Here one might be submerged beneath the water, held in its perfect embrace, and yet there is no abyss below, no infinite stretch of the deep – here are the walls of the bath, to keep the bounds of one’s solace. There is only the comfort of the finite here, and its gentle clasp.

Have you ever been beneath a shower of water, Mr Smith, or a very heavy rain, and cupped your hands to your breast, and watched the water fall and gather in the bowl you have made of your gathered palms, and overflow over your fingers, and drip between their gaps?

I have often dreamed of a bath such as that. To lie back in great palms carved of marble, their paint long-since washed away by the flow, and feel oneself at once bathed in water, with it showering over one’s head – in my dreams, those hands are as warm as they are impossible in their size, and in them is a tremendous safety, and at the same time, a terrible peril.

One could never be truly safe in the grasp of a titan, Mr Smith.

Even a gentle man might harm a mouse without meaning to – so too could a titan harm man.

You must never think, Mr Smith, that I would be of a mind to fall asleep in my bathwater – at such a time as I am very tired, I never step into a bath, even in cold water, and I wash myself only at the basin. As much as I trust my bath, so separate is it from the deepest of far-spread waters, I could not wholly trust the water even now.

Once, when I was a young boy, I was in the bath across from another boy, Thamyris, who rested in the other bath. We had drawn the longest straws, and each enjoyed the hottest, cleanest water that night – of course, the water was lukewarm at most, and in it was a red and rusted tang from the copper in the pipes, but to us, it was a great hedonism, only that Thamyris had spent the day playing out of doors, and by the time we were to bathe, he was very tired indeed.

Ordinarily, he was a loud boy to bathe with – he would sing at the very top of his lungs, and the beautiful wonder of his voice would reach the rafters and shake the dust from them, but on this night, he did not sing. Sitting forward in the bath, as I scrubbed at my shoulders and my back, my arms, my legs, he drooped forward, his eyes drooping closed.

I believe he must have fell asleep when I dipped my head beneath the water to rinse my hair of soap, because when I raised my head again, I could not see him, and when Carystus – Telamon was our headmaster, and we had tutors, but Carystus was in charge of caring for us outside of our studies – came into the baths to tell us our turn was finished, and that we were to pass our baths over to the next boys, he saw Thamyris laid down in the water, and hauled him out by his hair.

Thamyris rose sputtering, coughed water over the side of his bath, and Carystus told him, “Will you make of yourself the spectre in the water, that lured Narcissus to his death?”

“That spirit _was_ Narcissus,” coughed Thamyris. “The spectre of his ego.”

“As you say,” Carystus had said, and shoved his head back ‘neath the water.

“Carystus,” I said, after a moment or two had passed, anxious and uncertain, concerned when I saw water coast over the edge of the bath, and spatter on the floor. Thamyris was kicking from where Carystus – a big man, an archer with strong shoulders – held him underneath the water, and lacked the strength to overpower him. “Carystus— Carystus, release him. Carystus—”

Thamyris was screaming, I thought.

I could hear the sound eke out from beneath the water, could hear a once-musical voice turn ragged, like dried-out strings on a lyre, and I stumbled from my bath and grabbed Carystus by the wrist, pulled for what little good it could do me, and begged that he should release him.

“Why should I?” asked Carystus. “You don’t think the nymph should be given his water?”

“You will kill him,” I said wretchedly, and Thamyris went limp in the water.

“Take your towel,” said Carystus as he pulled Thamyris from the water, held limply by his hair, and for a moment I stared at him, quite horrified, until Thamyris coughed, and spat water over the edge of the bath. His eyes were red-rimmed and his face was very pale, and when his hands landed on the bath’s edge, they were weak and clumsy. “Take your towel,” Carystus said again. “Tell the next boys they can come in.”

For a few years, after that, Thamyris did not sing, and then when he sang again, his voice was so very sublime, Mr Smith. There was a deepness in it, a crack, but not the crack of something hoarse or broken – it was a crack in the way a vein of core cracks open a wall, and shows in purest gold.

I always tried to take Thamyris as a bathing partner, when I could. He would sing as though serenading me, lean over the edge of his bath with his chin rested upon its edge, his eyes half-lidded, his fingers curving through the air reminiscent in the idle motions of a conductor’s baton.

“It is very easy to sing,” he once said to me, “looking upon such beauty as yours, Ganymede. Do you not find it easier to sculpt, when my song carries from the next room?”

“I do,” I told him, and it was true.

I hope you do not think I am reminiscing on these things for no reason, Mr Smith – merely that this is what I thought of when I was in the bath, when my eyes were closed, and I did not sleep. I would never sleep in my bathwater: I would not like to drown. You really must believe me on this point, because I thought for a moment, when I opened my eyes, that I was dreaming.

Staring up at the painted ceilings, and it seemed to me, for a moment or two, that over my head the clouds were moving very quickly overhead, as though they were flying above me. They parted and shifted as they moved, like real clouds, and yet, they were not real. Was this the view a bird glimpsed, when he took to the sky?

I was enraptured by it, my eyes wide and staring and quite awake, feeling as though I myself were in motion, as though my bath were carrying me elsewhere beneath the roll of these peach-pink skies, as though I were feeling Gaia herself rotate beneath my person, where I lay still.

Then, so soon as it started, it stopped, and the skies above me were still.

I took in a sharp breath, filling my lungs, which ached – I had not inhaled since first I stared up at that most bewitching view, and was dizzy, I know not from lack of breathing or from the false motion itself.

Leaning forward, closing my eyes a moment to steady my spinning head, I reached for the soap, and commenced the ablutions I had lain here for. I remembered, as I washed myself, the songs Thamyris would sing in the bath – old songs, worship songs, poetry put to music, and so often, he would splice together one song with another, as a child would sew one bear’s limbs onto another bear’s body, making a sort of beautiful chimera, where all the gods shared one thread of story, and wove themselves through a tapestry in it.

Here, safe in the salted warmth of my bathwater, the soap moving over my flesh, I thought of Thamyris’ rounded jaw, his glittering, mischievous eyes, his wide mouth, the width of his fine, well-moulded throat, the strength of the apple that showed in it. When he sang, if you looked very closely, you could see the quiver of his lip at any sustained note or another, and if you put out your hand and touched his throat, as I did many times, you could feel the very motion of the notes themselves, could feel his flesh quiver as any instrument does when making music, the same as you might touching the frame of a lyre, or the box of a guitar.

When I rose from my bath, I did so distractedly, picking up my towel and putting it about my shoulders, as though I were some manner of automaton, my actions dictated by my clockwork. I could not help but muse upon those rolling clouds, and in my mind, I fancied I still heard Thamyris’ song, though he was surely so very far away—

I was awake, and yet, it was some manner of reverie.

Perhaps that is why I did not realise I had been plunged into darkness, had been working underneath its occlusive blanket, until I opened the door to the bedroom, and felt assaulted by the soft glow of the oil lamp there.

I confess to you, Mr Smith, I cried out, falling back into the darkness of the bathroom, and then turned and stared about myself, at the high windows. It had been hours upon hours until a long sunset should set in, let alone until darkness should reign, and yet it seemed to be that the night outside was black as pitch.

When I drew my fingers through my bathwater, I felt that it was cold. When I checked the clock, midnight had come and gone.

Shivering and out-of-sorts, I drew on my night clothes and put myself to bed.

I do not recall the dreams I had that night, Mr Smith, but I feel they were uneasy.

On Saturday morning, the rain fell in very hard sheets, pounding against the roof as though it thought to break through, and having swaddled myself in a thick jumper with a shawl drawn about my shoulders, I moved into the studio, but despite the cool wind I had felt from the open window in the stairwell, the studio was quite warm, even though the fire was not yet lit.

Removing my shawl and smiling to myself, I picked up some of the sketches I had done on my journey here, and picked one at random – a quick sketch of an alleyway I had seen whilst passing through Birmingham, which I recall was curiously lit by the oil lamps hung in the streets though the day was still well-lit, though it had been difficult indeed to convey these things through the medium of chalk alone – to set aside beside my easel, that I could commence to remake it in oils.

I do like the rain, Mr Smith, when I am out in it – a curious thing for a fellow to say, I’m sure you think, but I have always thought so – and can feel its liquid kiss upon my brows, curling through my hair, sliding down the length of my throat and beneath my blouse, even when it is cold. There is something curiously pleasurable about it, but also something very private, as though one is sharing an intimate moment with the skies themselves, which have opened to greet you with their wet embrace.

It feels different, inside.

Watching the rain lash against the windows, hearing its thundering rhythm and seeing the wet streaks upon the glass, seeing too the gushing flows from the gutters and the roof tiles, I felt as separate from the rain as I do from the rest of the world at Mnemosyne’s Rest, which is more than quite a bit.

The thought disquieted me, and left me in a maudlin, unhappy mood, despite the fact that the paints in my studio are quite beautiful and very smooth with which to work, and I am very grateful for them.

I think that most young men, having left behind themselves the orphanage in which they had grown up, must be quite happy to get some measure of solitude, but since moving to my own small apartment, I have often missed the noise of someone else in my space. It is not that I do not have any pride in my own territory, nor that I lack a sort of personal identity, merely that I suppose I am one who thrives off the presence of other people, if not interaction with them. Does that measure as sense in your estimations, Mr Smith?

I think that I might be very happy to be somewhere and never speak to anybody, so long as I could see people passing to and fro, and know that they were there.

No.

No, I lie to you Mr Smith, or at least make some hyperbole, for although I feel I hardly ever have anything interesting to say, I like to talk with people very much, but I do tell the truth, in that merely the presence of others is comforting to me. I don’t know that there is so slow or as painful a poison as loneliness: it envenoms the heart, the lungs, the very skin, that all of you aches for someone else’s presence.

I think, you know, that just as a man would die of hunger or thirst, that loneliness would kill him. Alone for too long, he would simply drop dead – even Sisyphus has the gods to watch over him, Mr Smith, and the presence of his great stone; even Prometheus has his birds.

At some point, my unhappy mood overcame me, and having painted a Birmingham alleyway, I washed my brushes – I am devout in the upkeep of my brushes, Mr Smith, and wash them as thoroughly as any man ought – and picked up my oil cloak and galoshes to go for a walk.

Oh, Mr Smith.

What relief came to me with the fall of rain upon my face.

Before I had even left the yard, the water falling had soaked me from crown to forehead, and the loose curls of my hair had been flattened down, that my hair hung in limp, soaking strands about my face. The water slid downward as though anxious to touch more of me, making a gutter of the little hollow that my spine formed in my neck and pouring down beneath my shirt collar; the bowl at the base of my throat soon overflowed with water, that it should splash against my collarbones and then drip lower, and even with my oil cloak loosely fastened upon my shoulders, and my shirt was soon stuck fast to my chest, soaked through.

It was cold, but not very cold – it was still a summer rain, after all – and at the gate, I took off my oil cloak and threw it over the fence pole, for it was really only weighing me down, and I didn’t need it to shield me.

I have often heard people remark, in hushed or panicked tones, that to walk in the rain will mean that you will soon and horribly die of pleurisy, but never yet have I really been ailed by any such illness. The only time in my life, Mr Smith – and I confess, my life has been quite short, but that cannot be used to discount all of my experiences, for I have not had the chance yet at a longer one – that I have really been very ill was when I was fifteen or so, and a small group of us got into the wine, and became quite insensible with it.

It was a shipment of Mr Zagre’s, you see. Every year, in late spring, he would come by to make his donations to the orphanage – he being one of our orphanage’s primary sponsors – and he would often toss out various things at the young children – marbles, sticks, dolls, little toys – but never really stop to speak with any of them. Once we were old enough, about fourteen or so, Mr Zagre would actually greet us in the hallways, as though we had grown enough in his estimation to be worth greeting.

Well, for the benefit of the others who would visit in the course of the year, Mr Zagre would always bring wine. He would bring a great many bottles, to be added to the cellar, but from his own vineyard, he would always bring a few great, huge barrels of wine.

That wine, Mr Smith, was not the sort you might be used to from a bottle – it was thicker than blood, and very, _very_ strong. It is, I can assure you, not the sort of thing that ought be drunk without some heavy act of dilution, which is exactly what we boys did _not_ do before commencing to drink it.

Consider the scene, Mr Smith: myself, Thamyris, and two twin boys I have never known incredibly well, but for one or two occasional encounters, Chryseos and Argyreos, all four of us so drunk we hardly knew our own hands and feet, let alone our names, lolling about with a bowl of wine half-drunk between us. We had intended to drink only enough to be tipsy, and then rush from the cellars elsewhere, that we might enjoy the fruit of our thievery without meeting the scrutiny of our schoolmasters, only that, as I have said, this sort of wine was meant to be heavily diluted.

Not a one of us could move for the drink, and when Mr Zagre came down into cellar, he surveyed the scene, and then laughed his loud, jolly laugh, and declared us to be forgiven – Mr Zagre is a man quite consumed with the spirit of forgiveness – and first picked up the twins, throwing them over his two great shoulders, before picking up Thamyris and I by the scruffs of our necks, as though we were little more than errant pups, all four of us.

He hauled us up the stairs, and tossed us one by one into our beds, laughing when we groaned for the way the wine all but sloshed dark within us, making us sea-sick from within.

Mr Zagre’s forgiveness counted for very little when he woke us up the next morning, speaking quite loudly and laughing uproariously, splitting our heads open with every guffaw. He never told Carystus what we had done, though, nor Telamon either.

He gave us cold compresses for each of us to put over our painfully hungover brows, and I recall for some hours that morning, he sat on the end of my bed with my feet resting against his great thigh, smoking a pipe and blowing out so smoke so dark it stopped being black, and started being blue instead.

With four of us hung over, and the rest of the boys merely drunk, we all sat about and listened to him talk – Mr Zagre talked very freely about this and that and everything in-between, but I cannot recall anything specific. He was that sort of conversational partner – not that I really matched him that day, nor joined the dialogue – who makes you feel quite at-ease, but not necessarily through saying anything of substance. He just talks, and even with a painful volume in it, it soothes.

Funny that I speak of Mr Zagre or Teleamon, or the Asimis, or Mr Lier, or that I would speak of any of our sponsors, as though they must be strangers to you, but surely you must have met one of them. Almost every one of them came to my little exhibition after I graduated the Academy, and said how pleased they were that I had come to make such beautiful things, that their charity had perhaps, in some small way, spurred me in that direction.

They were the pantheon we rather worshiped, growing up, you know, Mr Smith.

Perhaps that is why it was quite so overwhelming to have them come along to me, and praise my art, and kiss my cheeks, like devotion the wrong way around. I think that my art is quite pleasant to look at, but nothing to make me deserving of all that.

Consumed as I was by this reverie, I plodded along quite happily beneath the fall of the rain. Its weight and its wetness comforted me in a way a blanket or a compress could not, and beneath the open, grey skies, I walked the path that led farther north, keeping away from the cliff edge even as I looked down at the sea below.

I had walked beneath a copse of trees, and felt the coolness to be found underneath their shade, where was staved off what little sun could be found that day, when a man walking the other way up the path gasped in horror at the sight of me, and grabbed me by the shoulder. Unexpected as this was, I allowed myself to be grabbed and manhandled beneath his umbrella, which was gold and wide-brimmed.

“What is it you’re _doing_?” my captor demanded, horrified, and placed his fingers, which were quite warm, against my brow. He was handsome, somewhat taller than myself, with a thick beard and brightly coloured eyes the colour of woad. Startled and perplexed, I stared up at him dumbly, my lips parted, even as he slid his hand lower, cupping my cheek. His hand was tremendously warm, although I had not really been suffering from the cold, and its pressure was pleasant against my skin: the hand was smooth and uncalloused, the skin very soft. “Are you mute?” he asked: his voice was kinder now, more softly-spoken.

“No,” I said. “Merely that a man does not know what to say, when he is accosted by strangers in a wood.”

“ _Accosted_?” he repeated, incensed, and I watched the nostrils of his tapered nose flare, indignation showing in them as much as it did in his eyes. “I have done no such thing – what are you doing, wandering the cliffs, soaked to the skin?”

“Sir, I am walking,” I said, and twisted my shoulder out of his grasp, leaning away from the cup of his hand. “I fail to see how it is any business of yours.”

“It will be, when you are taken ill with pneumonia, and it is I called to facilitate your care,” he retorted, and placing one hand upon my waist, he turned me bodily the other direction, pushing me to walk alongside him. As we moved, he shrugged off his coat, and ignoring my many protests, he hung it about my shoulders. “Who are you?”

“I am staying at Mnemosyne’s Rest,” I said, and he pulled his hands back quite quickly from where they had been settled on my back, leaving his coat wrapped around me. It was horribly heavy, and so wet as I was, it felt like a strange weight on my back.

“Ah,” he said. “You are Mr Cavendish.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mr Smith sent word of me?”

“I know no Mr Smith,” he said, “but I know that a guest is staying at Mnemosyne’s Rest – an artist. For all your flights of fancy, you know, you really oughtn’t walk so in the rain. You will surely catch your death of it.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I can hardly even catch a ball without two weeks’ prior notice in writing.”

He stared at me for a moment, and I know not whether he was more disgusted by my attempt at humour or the sodden state of my clothes and person, but finally he said, in the harried tone of a man eager to change the subject – not for a moment, Mr Smith, had we ceased our promenade back the way I had come – “I am Ischys Darren. I am Heatherton’s general practitioner.”

“Oh,” I said, “were you recently called upon to assist Mr Samuel Thornwell? He took ill with a fever upon our journey here, and had to linger at the Stone Post.”

The doctor’s brow furrowed, and he shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “But if a fellow of yours has contracted a fever so recently, that is all the more reason you ought not be cavorting in the rain, young man.”

“Young man?” I repeated, titillated. “Doctor, you cannot be so many years my senior.”

“You could have fooled me,” said he. “Anyone older than a child would know better than to splash in the cold and wet.”

I resented very much to be spoken to this way, and to be so led upon the path like an obstinate mule, but I lacked the wherewithal to argue, and being as he had been the only man I had spoken to in Heatherton but for the bartender Silenus, I thought it would be foolish to spurn conversation from him, and allowed him to guide me home.

My oil cloak, when we stepped inside, had been taken from where I had thrown it over the fencepost, and instead hung from the hook beside the door, all but as though I had left it there before I had gone out.

“Hullo?” called the doctor out into the house. “Hullo?”

“They won’t come,” I said. “I never see them.”

“See whom?”

“The servants.”

He looked at me as though he didn’t quite believe me, and I shrugged off his coat – you must forgive me my petulance, Mr Smith, but I felt quite rudely interrupted – and walked into the parlour, where a fire had been lit already, and towels had been set on a frame beside it, the better to warm them.

But a few days at Mnemosyne’s Rest have spoiled me, for I was quite pleased but not wholly surprised, and I stripped off my wet clothes and exchanged them for the towels, holding one loose about myself, held in place by my elbows, as with the other I towelled off my hair.

I dropped both towels, then, and stood before the fire, letting it kiss my skin and pick up the tread where the rain had been forced to stop, and for a few moments stood like so, basking in the heat of the fire.

You will think it very rude of me, but in that moment, I quite forgot the doctor, until I heard him clear his throat.

Turning to regard him, I sighed softly as I felt the fire warm my back instead, and the doctor stared at me. His gaze dropped from my face, and looked over my body, trailing down my chest and lower still.

I have never had a great shame of my naked body – in the orphanage, nakedness was as common to us as breathing, and when we competed with one another, we would do so without clothes to hold us back. Whether it was to wrestle, to play with some manner of ball, or throw javelins, or haul rope between us, or anything else, we would do so without a stitch on us.

It wasn’t until I became a young man and went to the Royal Academy that I become more aware of other people’s shame – I modelled for quite a few of my fellow students, unbothered by it where they quite shuddered at the thought of another seeing them in so much as shirt sleeves. There is such a curious shame that Christians have about their bodies, although they think themselves made in the image of that God. Do you not find that so, Mr Smith?

Perhaps you are a Christian: I hope I do not offend.

In any case, Ischys is not one, but looked at me in the way that Christians do, seeming to be sort of overwhelmed by me.

“Are you the artist, Mr Cavendish,” said the doctor lowly, in a sort of wavering, filmy voice, “or the art?”

“The artist,” I said, perplexed.

“In that case,” he said, “you should be clothed. It is one thing for art to go uncovered, Mr Cavendish: it is another for its artist.”

“You seem very at-home telling another man what it is he should be doing,” I said. “But I have already come inside at your behest, Doctor, and put my wet clothes aside, and towelled myself dry, and am drying further even now, before the flame.”

After a moment’s consternation, the doctor laughed, and after a moment’s pause, exhaled, bowing forward but a head from his waist, and said, “I suppose if this is the best I can hope for, Mr Cavendish, I shall accept it.”

My opponent having relented, my own stubbornness faded like the morning dew, and I took up my banyan from the hook in the parlour, (although I confess, I had thought I had left it in my bedroom) and pulled it on.

You must think me very petulant indeed, Mr Smith, but while I have never been a man greatly opposed to taking direction, there is something quite infuriating about a stranger rather suddenly taking you by the arm and propelling you to where he thinks you ought be, rather than where you had been going.

Now, the doctor smiled at me.

“Tea?” I asked, somewhat curtly, and the doctor’s lips parted in surprise, but he did nod his head.

“It’s very good of you,” he said quietly, and when I put the kettle over the fire, I felt his gaze on me, as though I were some matter of medical curiosity he could not wrap his head about. “You wander in the rain often?”

“Only once since I have been here,” I said, “but often in London, yes. It is only rain, Doctor Darren – there is no poison in it.”

“There need be no poison,” he said, “hypothermia shall be your body poisoning itself.”

“What _rot_ ,” said I, and he clucked his tongue, shaking his head. “You have been Heatherton’s doctor for very long?”

“No,” he said. “I have been here but three years come next spring – I was walking out to Mr Asimi’s house.”

It was an uncommon name. Wholly uncommon. “Oipheus Asimi?”

“Yes,” the doctor said softly. “You know him?”

“I’ve only met him once,” I said. “But his wife, Kori, she has always been a very kind patron of mine. She bought me my first set of paints, and she wrote a letter of recommendation when I applied to the Royal Academy. I didn’t know they lived here.”

“Oh, they don’t,” the doctor said immediately, waving one hand. “The house is theirs, but their son, Plutus, he commands it for the most part. I was seeing to his sister, Honey – she’s been ill, these past few weeks. You’ve met them?”

I shook my head, even as I took the kettle up and began to pour two mugs of tea. At my invitation, Ischys sank down into his seat, and when I put the mug of tea into his hands, he cupped it gently between his palms.

“Ours is a modest community,” Ischys said quietly. “But you’ve been at school so long, I really don’t know that you’ve really experienced it as it is. Most people from orphanage’s or children’s homes like the ones we did take up a craft somewhat less isolated than you have. You are an artist?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am a sculptor, but I paint some, too.”

“I have a sculpture of yours in my office in Heatherton,” said Ischys. “A gift, from my own patron. It is a bunch of grapes, only this big, and Mr Cavendish, if I might praise your work, I never knew fruit could be wrought so very delicately in marble. One would think they were real if only the colour were still in them.”

“Your patron is Hepius Apollon,” I said quietly. “He counselled you to go to medical school?”

“Yes.”

“I sprained my ankle once, when I was a little boy, and he was visiting us – he set it for me.”

“Your patron sponsored you to study art?”

“He does now,” I said. “But my position in London was a scholarship. And— and I don’t believe I ever had a patron when I was still a boy. I think that everyone was very kind to me, with regards to art supplies. I never especially well with letters or numbers or anything else, but I can do this.”

You must know, Mr Smith, that most children in orphanages like the one I hailed from are often sponsored, in some particularity, by one of our trustees. Quite a lot of the trustees rather doted on me, I think, but never—

I think that I was popular. It is difficult to say. I am not very interesting, Mr Smith, and it never seemed to me that anyone was of a mind to pretend that I was for the sake of listening to me speak – but every trustee was always so kind to me, no matter that I didn’t seem to be all that special to them.

“And your patron now is?”

“Mr Smith.”

“Smith?”

“Yes.”

“I know no Smith.”

“John Smith.”

“ _John_ Smith?” He regarded me a moment, setting his mug down on the table before him, his brow very deeply furrowed in thought, and I watched the way he idly stroked his fingers through his beard. “He is not— he is not one of us, I take it?”

“An orphan?”

“One of our trustees, I mean.”

“Oh,” I said. “I surely don’t know.”

The doctor seemed frustrated, somehow, for reasons I could not say, but he nodded his head and stood to his feet, and thanked me for my hospitality before he left. He bade me, too, visit his surgery in Heatherton, and told me where his office was located, and advised me – very firmly – that I oughtn’t go into the rain again.

I hope you will forgive me, Mr Smith, all that I have written of Saturday, only that Sunday was quite dreadfully disinteresting to anyone except myself, for I spent a great deal of it basking in the sun shining through the studio windows and painting in turns. Monday was much the same – I waited most impatiently for my marble, often painting and walking this way and that, but as much as I twitched my curtains to peer out of the window, I found no sign of it.

And yet, Mr Smith, it is Tuesday now – it is just past noon, and I have eaten my lunch. (It was a sandwich, if this interests you.)

I have spent my day thus far contemplating, and what I have been contemplating is the great, _huge_ piece of marble that dominates the studio. Mr Smith, this marble slab is thrice my height, and perhaps eight feet by eight by twenty in its dimensions. I have scarcely ever in all my life had an occasion to look at such a huge piece of marble, and oh, Mr Smith, it shall take me years, _decades_ , to cut away what lies between my hands and the beautiful art beneath – I shall mine for it, Mr Smith, as though the face of Hyperion’s wife were precious ore.

I shudder to think how much it must have cost you – and please, do not think that I forget the other marble pieces, too, the smaller slabs and bricks piled neatly in the storage room, that I might carve them.

I know you told me you would never write, but I confess, I searched many times over for some manner of note or letter accompanying the delivery – I know not how the drivers managed to come up so silently as not to wake me, when surely so many oxen must have helped drive this parcel forward, let alone to bring it all inside, before I woke with the sunrise. I searched for word from you as a young girl might search for a love letter – you must think me so ridiculous, but it is merely that I have never been given a gift so audacious and so tremendous as this one: materials, yes, but such _faith_ in my abilities, why…

The marble is as yet cold under my hands, Mr Smith, but I shall breathe life into it yet.

Yours, all but fizzing with the passion of future creation,

Ganymede Cavendish

(P.S. You must forgive me if I write you too often, or too little, or if I speak too much, or the opposite. I have never written anybody letters before, and never in my life has anyone permitted me to talk so much at length. I hope I do not bore you. I should hate very much to bore a man who brings me such joy.

Thank you, Mr Smith.)


	4. Monday 24th July, 1876

Dear Mr Smith,

I fear you will think me a terrible slut, sir, but I have spent the whole of the day in bed.

Since my marble arrived Tuesday morning, I have spent every day in a sort of desperate fervour – I have filled at least fifty or sixty pages with sketches of my marble, imagining what I can bring from beneath its surface.

You have sent but a block of marble, Mr Smith, but in it already I see the beautiful face of the Titaness, wife of Hyperion, mother of the dawn, the moon, and the sun, she who has birthed wonders upon the Earth, who shines so brightly, will be born herself from this marble, Mr Smith. I shall free her from it, chip by chip with my hammer and chisels, until she sets one foot delicately upon my studio floor, and embraces the sunrise as it comes in through the windows.

That seems quite strange now that I write it down, Mr Smith, but as I have spent the week pacing the corridors of Mnemosyne’s Rest, drawing and sketching constantly on one page or other, I have quite tired myself, and my dreams have been tremendously vivid. In every dream I have, it seems to me that Theia steps out from the marble as easily as rising from a pool of water, and although she moves out of it very fluidly, I know, in the dream, that it is I who wrought it. Is it not so very strange, Mr Smith, how you might know things to be true in dreams without quite understanding how or why you know it to be true, only that you do?

But in any case, yesterday – yesterday being Saturday – I began to carve my first maquette.

Do you know what a maquette is, Mr Smith? I hope I do not condescend to you – I know that you have chosen to sponsor me as an artist, and evidently, you know people who can purchase for you great slabs of marble, and transport it very fleetly and silently, but I don’t know if that means you have a great expertise where art is concerned, or if you only wish to see its final result.

If you do know, you must jump over this passage, and jump over any other where I bore you with my technical explanations – oh, Mr Smith, I would hate indeed to bore you. When my letters are the recompense I pay you for the kindness of your patronage, what a shame it would be to bore you with them.

When a gentleman sculpts with clay, he can take away or add to it as he pleases until it is time to set it within the kiln to bake – so long as the clay is moist and kept flexible beneath one’s hands, one can spin it and mould it and alter it as one pleases, and if one accidentally draws too much away, one can take more clay from the slab and return it to one’s subject.

(I do not like clay, Mr Smith. It is a dreadfully sticky substance, and my hands always come away so red and smutty with it, I feel as though I have been working at some abattoir.)

To sculpt with wood or stone or something else, it is different. One works from one block, you see, and when one chips something away from the block, it is gone – there is no glue on this earth, Mr Smith, that might repair a lopsided chest, once one has gone awry with one’s chisel. It is the work of a sculptor to mine one’s subject from the oppressive weight of its surroundings, but one has to be careful not to damage one’s subject in the process.

As you can imagine, when working on a very large piece of marble, as the one you have so graciously gotten for me, it could be very easy indeed to injure my Titaness in my quest to free her from within: therefore, one creates a maquette, which is a sort of version of one’s sculpture in miniature, and once it is done, you can segment out the anatomy as one has made it, and use callipers to mark one’s points of particular interest on the larger ones – the callipers allow one to recreate the work to scale by acting as landmarks, you see?

I don’t know that I have ever sculpted as I did yesterday, Mr Smith, not in all my life.

I rose from my bed, dressed, and descended the stair to the dining room, where I ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs and some fried vegetables, and then I went into the studio, and having done many sketches in the week, and having sort of digested them in my dreams, as one does, as soon as I crossed the threshold, I picked up my chisel and my hammer and set to work—

And then all of a sudden, Mr Smith, I came to myself, as though waking once more from a dream, only that it was quite dark outside and I had stripped off my vest and unbuttoned my shirt, so drenched in sweat as I was that it stuck to my chest, and my arms ached quite terribly and I was covered all over in marble dust, and I was so very hungry I was dizzy with it, and from the small block of marble – this one being only about a foot high – Theia’s silhouette was quite hazy, but visible as that of a woman’s.

It was so very queer, you know.

My hands, exhausted, wilted like dying flowers, and I dropped my chisel and hammer onto the couch, moving on jellified legs into the next room and falling before the dining table, devouring… I really can’t recall what my meal was, only that it was hearty and very meaty, and quite juicy, besides, for I recall the way the juice stuck to my chin.

I felt so very exhausted I wanted to go straight to bed, but I couldn’t bear to thinking of the state I had left my workspace in, and I limped back to the studio to clean my tools and pack them away before I retired to bed, but the servants had evidently already swept through, for all my marble dust was quite gone away, and my tools were sparkling clean, and dry.

Standing there in the doorway, Mr Smith, I could scarcely tear my eyes from Theia, still blanketed as she was in marble, as yet not wholly made in miniature, so undefined, and my fingers twitched at my sides – I wanted very badly to return to my work, to continue my efforts, but really, Mr Smith, I ought not have progressed so much in one day, and to have done what I had already, my whole body hurt with it, as though I had spent the day labouring as Sisyphus does.

My shoulders, my arms, my back, my waist, my thighs, my feet, even, all of my body ached, and was so very stiff I could have been made of marble myself, and I knew that I couldn’t bear to do even another minute of hewing work without dropping dead.

I almost wept climbing the stairs to my bed.

How my legs ached, how they hurt, and I wanted to take a hot bath just to soothe the pain from my body, but I was certain as soon as I slipped into the water the soothing heat of it would send me straight to sleep, and it would be the most ridiculous way to drown, you know, so I did not. I sort of fell out of my clothes, wriggling out of them, and fell forward naked atop the sheets on my bed, white dust still stuck fast to me in places, every part of me stiff—

Oh, you must not think too poorly of me, Mr Smith, but I was so very tired I didn’t even put myself beneath the covers. I just sort of laid on top of them, and told myself within but a few seconds I would roll myself appropriately beneath their warmth, but the night was quite temperate, and I was so tired I fell asleep before I managed it.

When I woke, it was well past noon and I had put myself beneath the duvet in the night – I would have felt quite guilty, I think, but I really have no notion of what time it was when I slipped into bed, only that it was black as pitch outside, so I feel it must have been very late.

My lunch awaited me on a tray, so I hate it, and since then I have sort of sprawled around and laid in place, until I finally reached for the tray again and commenced this letter to you.

I shall take a bath this evening, for even after all this rest, my whole body quite hurts – I really don’t know what I was thinking, working in such a fever, but truth be told, I don’t know that I was thinking at all. After all, I don’t remember thinking – were thoughts really thought, Mr Smith, if one has no notion of having thought any at all?

Mr Zagre says a good madness can be quite the catharsis – perhaps that is what it was.

I have entered such inspirited states in my life, but never for quite so long, and never in such a way as to not stop to eat or to rest, but sometimes, I suppose, we are moved by the soul of our art, and it quite possesses us.

Even as I write to you now, Mr Smith, I can hear the water running into the bath in the next room. I wonder, were I to creep forward from beneath my blankets, nude as I am, and silently open the bathroom door to peek within, who might I see? I have not had much occasion to think about it, these past days, but I cannot help but wonder what manner of staff occupy this home with me, always out of my sight.

Are they men, women? Old, young? Fat, thin, tall, short, handsome, ugly? Do they care for art? Do they care for me – am I an inconvenience to them? Are they worried that I should see them? Is it at your instruction, Mr Smith, that they remain always hidden from my sight?

I cannot bear to attempt it, of course.

My body aches too much to move very stealthily, and I am so very tired, I do not know that I am even in the mood to entertain a conversation with whomever might be running my bath – I am impossibly grateful, of course, but…

At times, I lack the spirit for conversation, and now is one of those times, but it is easy to write. I wrote two letters earlier in the week, one for the Stone Post, and one to the family of Mr Thornwell, inquiring after his health, for I have heard no word from anyone about his health, and I am concerned for him, and I also wrote a letter to Mrs Kori Asimi, telling her that I am now in Heatherton, and that I was very grateful for all her past support of my artwork, and that I knew her children lived nearby.

I wrote to Telamon at the Aeginan Home, also, and asked if perhaps he might have an address for Thamyris, for I have not thought of him often these past few years, and yet now at Mnemosyne’s Rest, he is a constant consideration in my day’s musings. He was in my dream last night, you know – I did not see him, for I had eyes only for Theia as she stepped from the marble, a white ghost in miniature, and yet I could hear Thamyris singing. His music filled my studio to the brim, and filled me, also.

I have never been a man particularly posed to correspondence, as I have told you, Mr Smith – I am not at all an interesting man, and I suppose at times, I rather struggle to put myself to the page. It seems to me I am a creature who was made to be looked at, and everything I create is made to be looked at, also – I am not naturally poised for conversation, and even at the Royal Academy, very few people ever seemed to be interested in speaking for me for every long, and I sometimes think that perhaps if they could not look at me while we were engaged in conversation, they would not bother to speak with me at all.

Please do not mistake me, for I am very grateful that people find me good-looking, for beauty is a sign of favour from the gods, but I only wish I had more substance behind me. I think sometimes that I am like a sketch some better artist than I have wrought upon the page: beautiful to look at, for a moment, but not worthy of extensive contemplation, and with nothing whatsoever behind the face of the sketch itself.

Oh, Mr Smith, I worry so much that I am empty, and that everyone I have ever known is full.

It is for that reason I have never much written to anyone, for the act of correspondence is putting one’s soul upon the page, and but for what is sometimes revealed in my better art, I do not know that I have ever been in possession of such things, and I do not wish to bother anyone with my soulnessness, only I have been in Heatherton for quite some weeks now, and clapped eyes on almost no one, and had no conversation with anyone since I spoke with Mr Thornwell on my journey north, and really, what I like is to listen to other people speaking in conversation – you know, interesting people, who speak back and forth with one another, and aren’t held back by such uncertainty as I have.

Perhaps I make no sense to you. Perhaps you think I am very mad indeed, and that my madness lacks any sort of charm or poetry, as one might hope from it.

Excuse me, Mr Smith. It seems I grow quite maudlin, and that must be dull indeed to read. I shall bathe, and return refreshed to write to you.

…

It is a good job, Mr Smith, I did not date my letter to you before I commenced to write it, for as I write to you now it is now Monday morning.

I did not fall asleep in my bath – as I have told you before, I would never – but after I had washed myself, I

[ **a segment of text hastily blotted out]**

There are things I ought not write upon the page, and I do apologise for the mess I have made of my paper above, but I would not write anything that would have you think very little of me. It is merely that I took a long bath, Mr Smith, and was so very tired in the aftermath I fell back into bed still somewhat damp from it, and slept then until came the morning.

I shall send this letter off you to immediately, Mr Smith, and then return to my studio to work some. My muscles still ache somewhat, though not nearly so awfully as they did, and I am rested enough, I think, to return to my work.

Yours, tired but fit to create,

Ganymede Cavendish.


	5. Friday 28th July, 1876

Dear Mr Smith,

I wish, you know, that I could save the sound of the rain on the glass roof of the studio here, and send it onto you, that you could play it from a music box or suchlike, Mr Smith. It is better to be out in it than to have the glass between its sweet kiss and one’s skin, but the sound it makes really is tremendously peaceful, a sort of constant, pulsing set of overlapping drumbeats. 

When I sit down to work at my easel, or when I stand and work to carve, I almost don’t hear its music, and yet as I work it feels as though the regular rhythm of it soothes me, somehow, and spurs my mind to greater focus. There is a magic in that, I think.

I have not in these past few days fell into the same sort of strange reverie I mentioned in my previous letter – I have not again worked so insensibly or with so little regard for rest, food, or water, and instead have focused myself with somewhat more restraint, but progress has indeed been made. I have siphoned off more of the marble trapping the mistress Theia in her miniature form, and she begins to show more of herself with each few hours’ work I put into her; meanwhile, I have produced a few other sketches and small paintings, and set these aside.

I hope you do not think I rush my work, Mr Smith, for that was often a concern of my tutors, merely that I work at a very quick pace, and feel quite unwell, when I am not creating. Or—

Not unwell, that is too dramatic a way of putting it – you might think that to take a rest would be to inject into myself a poison.

It is merely that I like to make art, very much I like to. I do not think it is necessarily the case – as some people seem to think – that to make art quickly is to make art below one’s par. We all have our natural paces, Mr Smith – I have always been a fast fellow, in more ways than one.

On Wednesday, after I had taken my lunch, I had returned to working for a while. I worked very meticulously, regularly consulting my sketches as I worked my chisels carefully into the grooves I had drawn onto the stone – it took me some time, as I must admit, Mr Smith, I have struggled to make my choices over precisely which way I should sculpt Theia’s skirts.

Her face comes to me as clear as day, and I could recite its every plane and angle from memory: I do not believe I will have any trouble at all finally creating its mirror in stone, for I see it in my dreams, in my idle imaginings, know it so well as my own face, by now, and I decided almost as soon as you made your offer to me how I would pose the Titaness’ hands, that I would have them set out before her, her palms raised skywards, her fingers outstretched. Even the curls of her hair, Mr Smith, I visualise easily, and I know every lock I will sculpt, when it comes down to it.

But—

Her dress?

Oh, how to sculpt it, Mr Smith?

Ought she have a wide skirt, caught by an invisible wind, rising at her sides or falling behind her? Ought her feet be together, her stance still, or should she be taking one step forward, as though greeting an old friend – or perhaps her husband? Perhaps her skirt should be more static, falling over her knees, its hems gathering about her ankles, falling over her feet – or perhaps it should be longer still, and trail behind her.

Already, I plan to craft her three children – the Sun, the Moon, and the Dawn – in miniature, and I had thought to craft Helios and Selene at Eos’ shoulders, the three of them carved of one block of marble, with a globe of the sun on each side and the moon on the other, but now I wonder if I ought not sculpt the three of them, and have them reclining at their mother’s feet. Does that appeal to you, Mr Smith? The vision of Theia’s skirts falling about her feet, and her children lying upon the fabric?

In my early stages, I rather envisioned them blooming from the ground, but I do hate to mix my metaphors, and the idea of a sun and moon with leaves and flowers sprouting beneath them struck me as cartoonish more than charming.

I am using you to think aloud again, Mr Smith – I do apologise, and I hope it does not trouble you.

In any case, on Wednesday, after lunch, I was sculpting, and I heard a noise in the other room. Initially, I thought I had imagined it, for I took my hammer and chisel from the marble to listen and found it all silent, yet as soon as I began to carve again, I heard it once more. It was only after a few moments’ pause that I heard it clearly and realised it was a knock at the door, and I hurriedly got up, dusting off my hands and rushing to the door.

Dragging it open, expecting some sort of delivery man, or perhaps Ischys Darren, I instead laid eyes on a couple I had never seen before.

The man was tall, his dark curls of hair down to his upper arm, so that they cascaded over his shoulders in thick tresses, and he had hazel eyes that caught the light: he was leaning on the arm of a woman, tall though not so tall as him, thick, tight curls bouncing around her head, gold and chestnut in colour. They both had brown skin, a handsome colour, but each wore it with different undertones: to the woman’s skin, there was a yellow colour underneath like the skin of a melon; to the man’s, there was a cooler undertone, like the dark glint of unprocessed silver.

I stood for a moment, struck dumb, and looked between the two of them, uncertain. She wore a summer dress and a broad-rimmed sunhat pinned into her curls; he wore no hat, and nor, to my surprise, did he wear a full suit, but just his shirt sleeves, and he wore neither a tie nor a cravat. His shirt was open at the neck, and showed the column of his throat, and a silver coin resting in the hollow between his collarbones.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “How— how might I help you?”

“Is he handsome?” asked the gentleman, his lips curving into a warm, easy smile. “Mama said he was handsome.”

“He is,” said the lady, and she smiled, too. “Ganymede?”

She pronounced my name – as she pronounced all her words – in the Greek fashion, the d softened, her tongue touching the base of her teeth instead of the back of them, and my name, in her mouth, had four syllables instead of three. It was the way Telamon always pronounced my name, when I was growing up, though he was Macedonian by birth, not Greek.

“Ye— Yes,” I said softly, swallowing. “I do beg your pardon, but I’m afraid I don’t recognise either of you. Are we acquainted?”

“Ganymede, my name is Honey, and this is my brother, Plutus. Our mother said you wrote to her, and that you were our neighbour – we had to come and see you, of course.”

“Oh,” I said, pushing the door further open. “Your mother is Kori Asimi – your father, Oipheus.”

“Ah, such a student of our family tree,” Plutus purred, apparently delighted. “Handsome and intelligent. Is there nothing the young man doesn’t have?”

“Manners,” Honey said pointedly.

“I do beg your pardon,” I said again, stepping back. “Please, please, come in. I’ll make tea.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she led her brother into the house.

I don’t know if you know Oipheus Asimi, Mr Smith, or Kori Asimi, personally – Mrs Asimi was always very kind to me at the orphanage, whenever she and any of the other trustees came to visit, and always pushed me toward art supplies, and as I have told you before, it was her who sponsored me to apply for the Royal College of Arts.

She is a kind woman, Mrs Asimi: she always wears silver jewellery, and fresh flowers in her hair. Her husband makes the jewellery, you know. He owns several mines, I know, and to my awareness, he smiths his own silver, and works very delicately with his hands.

He is blind, you know.

He wears wide spectacles with dark blue lenses, but the glass is opaque, and too dark to see through, I would wager – it’s the sort of frosted glass you might see in stained glass windows. I have met Kori a great many times, but her husband I have met only once. I was scarce eighteen and I had been working with wood and stone with one of my schoolmasters, and it was my first exhibition of any of my work, and I was overeager, earnest to impress the husband of a woman whom I held in such high regard, whom I, indeed, had long-since idolised.

Oipheus is a short man, a good deal shorter than his wife – and, indeed, his children – and he is very stout and square, muscular. His cane is black, with a silver-white band around the base, and I was surprised that he came to the exhibition, but I was desperately proud of the work I had made, and as some of the other trustees had gathered around a small sculpture carved of sandstone to discuss it – I had no parents to come for me, but I was flattered indeed that so many people had come to see my work – he stood aside, with both his hands upon his cane.

I was so bold, Mr Smith, and I look back on it with some embarrassment.

“Do you not like art, Mr Asimi?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment, his lips pressed loosely together. “Mr Cavendish,” he said – he has a tremendously deep voice, Mr Smith, that comes from very low down indeed, as though he mines it, too, from the earth, with the ore he mines – and tilted his head slightly as if to hear me better, “if it hasn’t escaped your notice, I cannot appreciate your art as my wife can.”

“Oh,” I said, breathlessly, too earnestly, “but I am a sculptor, Mr Asimi, you do not need your eyes to look at it.”

Mr Smith, I am ashamed to tell you that I was so eager to show my work to my dearest patron’s husband that I took his stout hands by the wrists and tugged them to my nearest piece, the first thing I ever created out of marble. It was a carving of a hand, the fingers encrusted with rings – it took me such a long time, Mr Smith, and even thinking of it now, there were a million things wrong with its design and my process in carving it, but I was so very proud of it, at the time. I only realised how incredibly rude what I had done was after a moment had passed: my hands, which had lingered over Oipheus’ cool skin, drew back as if he burned me, and the old man stood very, very still for a moment, his mouth a thin line, twisted slightly. His cane, which had fallen against the edge of the wood box plinth, clattered to the ground.

I was almost terrified he would strike me, his fingers clumsily set against the marble fingers of the hand I had made myself, and apologies bubbled up in my throat, assurances that I would ordinarily never be so bold as to touch a man so and manoeuvre him like a puppet without his consent, least of all a blind man no doubt plagued far more than a sighted one by people attempting to manipulate his movements, and my lip quivered with them, but before I could lend any of them voice, Mr Asimi began to laugh.

It was such a deep laugh, Mr Smith. I felt it in my own chest, as much as I heard it in my ears, and I stood there, pale as a sheet, my lips parted, my eyes wide, trying my best not to shake.

I became aware of eyes on us, and I looked with terror to the other trustees, to Mrs Asimi, to Mr Lier, to Doctor Apollon, and the rest, each of them staring at us. They each looked shocked and surprised, some of them as scared as I was – I had never even heard of Mr Asimi laughing – but Mrs Asimi crossed the room toward us.

“Oipheus?” she asked. She had a secretive smile on her face, leaned into him as she spoke, touched one of her hands to his back.

Her husband was touching his fingers to the hand now, tracing over it, and I watched the tips of his fingers gently stroke over the back of the hand, the knuckles, before he began to trace the individual jewels and shapes of the rings on it. Mr Asimi’s hands were then – I expect are always – very clean, but his fingernails were caked with dirt.

“Hush, Percy,” he said, still smiling. “I am appreciating your boy’s art.”

Kori smiled at me, then, and picked up Oipheus’ cane, and she reached out, touched my arm. She didn’t say anything, just smiled at me, squeezed my shoulder.

It was off the back of that exhibition that she wrote my letter of recommendation to the Royal College, you know. I was impossibly grateful. I apologised to Mr Asimi, later, but he only smiled and tapped his knuckles against my cheek like he was knocking on wood.

His son is blind, too.

Unlike his father, he did not walk with a cane: he let his sister lead him into the house, one of his hands clasped loosely about her arm, and although he wore nothing to obscure the colour or shape of his eyes, I saw after a moment of looking at his face that his eyes were quite heavily lidded, and although his eyes moved in their sockets, the pupils reacting to the change in light, he did not appear to follow anything around the room, not trace the path he and his sister took into the parlour.

When I rushed into the kitchen, I found there was a pot of tea waiting for me, with three cups laid out, and I murmured a quiet thank you to a servant I could not see, and brought the tea into the other room.

“Mama has spoken of you, these past few years,” Honey said. She and her brother lounged on the sofa as though they were interlocking parts of the same sculpture: she kept one arm loosely wound around her brother’s neck, and he threw his legs over her knees, his ankles crossed one over the other. There were silver buckles on his shoes; on his sister’s there were gold. I wondered if their father had made these, too. “She says you are a very good artist – she says that your painting is fine, and that your sculptures are grand.”

“Papa says you laid hands on him in your school’s hall,” Plutus said, and I startled pouring tea, making the teapot clatter against the cup, and making tea splash on the tray. He must have heard it, because he laughed, and went on, “You must not be so afraid, Ganymede. He said of you _, That Ganymedes, from the feel of them, has very handsome hands, and with them, he crafts fine work_.”

“Our father does not praise lightly, you know,” said Honey.

“Or often,” added Plutus.

“He is a miserly old man.”

“And very cold.”

“But you warmed him.”

“For a time.”

“For a moment.”

“It is more than most of us could aspire to.” Plutus reached up, and loosely wound one of his curls around his fingers, playing with it idly. His ears were pierced, or at least, the right one was – I saw the glint of metal against the earlobe when his shifting hair let it catch the light.

In truth, Mr Smith, I found this dialogue, evidently a natural patter that formed between them, to be somewhat overwhelming, and for a little longer than I might have liked I was quiet, until I asked if each of them took milk or sugar in their tea. Neither of them did: they took it black, as it was.

“I met your doctor,” I said, desperate to fill the quiet between us, and feeling strangely nervous about discussing the siblings’ parents, lest I say something accidentally to offend. “Doctor Darren.”

“Ischys,” Plutus said, smiling.

“Was he— was he there to examine your eyes?” I asked. Honey raised her eyebrows, and I faltered. “I— I do apologise, I shouldn’t have—”

“I sprained my ankle some time ago,” Plutus said idly, with a wave of one hand. “That is all – Ischys was only to ensure it was quite healed before Honey and I leave Heatherton this month. It was my own fault: I neglected to use my cane at a party, and slipped in some spilled wine.”

“You do not like to use a cane?” I asked politely.

“No,” Plutus said. “I like to be led by a willing partner.”

“He likes to gossip,” supplied his sister. “Being blind is a useful excuse when your only wish in life is to take someone’s arm and murmur in their ear.”

Plutus laughed, and I almost did but restrained myself: I felt my cheeks blush somewhat, for I could not be so rude as to laugh at something so impolite said about such a recent acquaintance.

“He’s very shy,” Plutus said to his sister. “Mama said he was shy.”

“She did,” Honey agreed, addressing Plutus.

“I am not… I am not shy,” I assured them. “Merely— I do not wish to be impolite. I would not have you think me rude.”

“You wish to make a good first impression,” corrected Plutus, holding up one finger. His hands were nothing like his father’s: they were elegant and slender, and the fingernails were stupendously clean. “You worry what we’ll tell our mother about you. Is that not so?”

My cheeks veritably burned.

Plutus chuckled.

“Sit close to me,” he instructed, withdrawing his legs from his sister’s lap, and he patted the seat beside him, where the armchair was angled toward the sofa. “I want to look at you.” Something must have shown in my face, because he and his sister both laughed at the same time, leaning into one another, before he leaned forward and patted the seat again. His eyes looked forward, not at me, or at anything in particular. “It’s a figure of speech, Ganymede. Come, sit.”

Rising to my feet, I stepped around the small table, and as Honey sipped at her tea, I sank into the armchair, sitting at the edge of the seat. Plutus reached for me, and for a moment his fingers brushed the front of my vest before he lifted it, and then he cupped my cheek on one side before bringing up the other hand to join it.

His hands were warm, and his palms were exquisitely smooth – I have no doubt that he uses some product to make the skin that soft, and I confess, although I use a cream upon my own hands, my own hands are somewhat battered, as any sculptor’s are, from my use of hammer and tool. I try my best to preserve them, of course, but the occasional nick or error is inevitable.

I was still, as he touched my face.

“Does this help you know what I look like?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “There are no eyes in my hands, Ganymede.”

“But the shape of my face?”

“What do I care for the shape of your face?” he asked, as his thumbs traced the lines of my cheekbones, his fingertips curling into my hair. “Am I to sculpt its like from clay?”

“Why, then?”

“You laid hands on my father without his permission,” Plutus said. “See how I return the favour?”

I did laugh at that, scolded as I was, and he chuckled.

“I can feel the heat when you blush, you know,” he murmured, tracing the tips of his fingers my temples, tracing my eyebrows delicately with each thumb, and then touching my nose on each side. Whatever he used for his hands was scented, and they smelt of sandalwood. “My father was not offended by it. He thinks of everyone he meets as full of youth, stupidity, and impatience – you just proved his point. With that said, I wouldn’t try it again. With him, or anybody else, blind or otherwise.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I promised. With his littlest and ring fingers on each hand, he traced a featherlight trail from the top of my throat to the bottom of my chin, and when I shivered at the ticklish touch over the base of my jaw, he hummed, amused.

“I would like to see how you responded if my fingers erred lower,” he said musingly, “but below the neck, you are spoken for.”

“Spoken for?” I repeated, and Plutus withdrew his hands, setting them neatly in his lap. I felt their ghost on my face – he had touched me very tenderly, and I almost missed their touch, wondered what it would feel like if he touched me more solidly, without such a faint, glancing touch.

“What is it you are sculpting?” Plutus asked. He leaned forward, carefully moving his hand over the surface of the table, and when his fingers brushed his teacup, he felt for its loop and lifted it gracefully to his mouth, taking a sip.

“Mama says it is a Titan,” Honey said, and looking between the two of them, feeling as though I were spinning on a weathervane, I hesitated a moment.

Then, I said, “It is a sculpture of Theia – Euryphaessa. Mother of Eos, Selene, and Helios. I will sculpt them, also.”

“Wife of Hyperion,” said Honey mildly. “You do not wish to sculpt him?”

“He…” I began, and then stopped, for I hardly knew what to say.

Have you ever known something to be one case or the other, Mr Smith, and yet never taken a moment to consider as to why? I had never for a moment considered sculpting Hyperion, nor even sketching him – in attempting to think of him, I could summon no vision of him into my mind, could not imagine what he might look like. He was invisible to me, unseen. He was not like Theia, nor their three children, perfectly visible to me as though I had known them my life through.

I could not make anything of Hyperion: I did not know him.

“What can I say?” I asked, and shrugged my shoulders. “All I can tell you is that I have a vision – it is that vision I seek to execute.”

“Well-answered,” Plutus said. “We must have you to dine with us next year, Ganymede.”

“We are leaving Heatherton next week,” Honey said. “We shall travel a month before we return to our mother’s home for the winter.”

“This isn’t your mother’s home?” I asked.

“The house here is Papa’s,” said Plutus. “He lends it sometimes, in winters, but never to us. It is too cold for our hot blood.”

“I am surprised you are going, that’s all,” I said softly. “Silenus said Heatherton is at its busiest in winter.”

“This is true,” Honey agreed. “Many of the inhabitants of Heatherton are further north – they summer on islands, and they live along the coast. In winter, such places come too treacherous: they return south in their boats, to Heatherton. You saw the empty dock, yes, Ganymede? When October comes, and when it gives way to November, that dock will be alive with vessels.”

“And there is Poseidon’s Jewel, also. She is a fishing vessel – she should return at the end of August, the beginning of September. She is normally gone for two months at a time, and always returns with a very great haul – men and women will come from nearby villages to help pack the fish. You like Silenus?”

“He was pleasant, when I met him,” I said. “I would not speak ill of him.”

“So political with his answers,” Plutus murmured as an aside. It was strange, I must admit, sitting between the two of them as they spoke of me like that – it made me feel, in some strange way, as though I were being observed from afar, or… No. No, Mr Smith, I know how they discussed me: they did it as though I were art in a gallery, and they were observing me. I did not entirely dislike it – it was freeing, in a way, to think they had no expectation of response on my part. “I expect he likes you, Ganymede. Silenus likes almost everyone.”

“He liked me better than the last publican I met, I’m sure,” I said.

“Who was that?” asked Honey.

“Jude,” I said. “I don’t know his surname. He and his sister run the Stone Post.”

“Turnbull is his name,” said Plutus. “He has a nice voice, but he is uncertain of Greeks. Anyway…” He rose to his feet, then, and put his teacup aside. “It was pleasant indeed to make your acquaintance, Ganymede. You must call on us when we return.”

“Yes,” I agreed, giving a nod of my head. “Of course. It was good of you to call.”

“Was it?” Plutus asked, with a small smirk. “It was my intention to be bad.” He missed, at first, and touched the top of my hair: the second attempt, he chucked me with one knuckle under the chin. “Taller than I thought,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said reflexively, and he laughed.

“What a queer thing to be sorry for,” was the response, and he took his sister’s arm to leave.

“Goodbye, Ganymede,” Honey said. “We hope you have a productive winter.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

As I walked ahead of them to the door, pulling it open for them, they spoke to one another in Greek, and it was plain from the way Honey glanced at me that they were speaking of me, but they each had thick accents which I was not familiar, and all I could make out of it was my own name, and a few words for “handsome”.

It was flattering, of course.

And—

And I feel, sometimes, it might be nice to be artwork. It seems to me that it would be far easier to be created than creator.

I returned to my work with the Asimi siblings on my mind, and they trickled through my head, the thoughts rotating. It was part of the music of my studio, much like the patter of the rain – I thought of their musical voices, their handsome features, their gold and silver jewellery.

I worked for the rest of the day through, and slept quite well the next night, and after working upon my sculpture until a little after noon yesterday, I dressed for town and walked down in it, holding my umbrella over my head. I like to feel the rain, you understand, Mr Smith, but I don’t enjoy so much to sit in sodden clothes, and regrettably, most public houses won’t permit you to dine in the nude – or at least, they don’t that I know of. Perhaps one needs merely to ask.

I felt the rhythm and weight of each raindrop upon my umbrella’s skin, feeling the pressure of them in my wrist, and although there was still a decent amount of light left in the day, it was quite grey, and I was very careful to watch my step as I took the path down the hill, wary of slipping on the path’s muddied edges.

Once more, as I passed through the village, I noticed no one walking to and fro, and the post office was still closed, and the grocer’s was still closed, too, but the lights were lit in the tavern, and when I stepped inside, the warmth of the fire, which was lit despite the day not being too cool at all, reached for me, brushed my skin.

“Mr Cavendish,” said Silenus. “Here for a drink?”

“For a meal,” I said. “If it doesn’t trouble you.”

“How could it?” Silenus asked, beaming: his moustache curled up when he grinned, and I gave him a small smile.

I did not speak much, while I was present with him – I ate a modest meal of bread and cheese and a little bacon, and Silenus did all the talking. He made small talk about the weather, about the sea and the shoreline, and the whole time he talked, he watched me eat.

It was quite pleasant, to be in someone else’s company for a while, but before I walked up the hill to return home, I took some more time alone: I walked out toward the shore, and I spent some time wandering in the rockpools, which were overflowing with both the washed up sea water and the falling rain. When I crouched and held my umbrella over the puddles and pools, though, I could shield them enough for me to see into the water without it being disturbed, and I could see all manner of small crabs, limpets, urchins, clams, and all things of that nature; I could see several algaes and anemones, too, and even little minnows and small fish that swam one way and the other.

I would still like to sit at the pool on a dry day and sketch them all, so delightful are these small creatures in their complexity and diversity, but it was far too wet a day for that.

It was just…

It was just nice to look at them, Mr Smith, that’s all.

I admit, Mr Smith, I almost didn’t want to return home. I wanted to stay in the pub and listen to Silenus talk some more, or even wait and see if any other patrons made themselves known. I did not wish to be on my lonesome, but I did not wish to partake of any sort of ale or beer, and I thought that Silenus would think me very queer indeed if I asked for anything else.

I stood in those rockpools for quite a long time.

I felt tremendously lonely, and I knew that my walk home would be something even lonelier, but…

Oh, Mr Smith, I couldn’t even say what I was thinking.

Eventually, I walked glumly home regardless, although I made some few circuits of the village first, looking out for some sign of Ischys’ office, though I could not make it out, and when I came home, there was comfort to be found, for I found a hot bath waiting for me.

I rather melted in that bath, Mr Smith.

The peach-coloured skies opened above me, and I lay back in my bath, and thought of Plutus’ hands on my face, his soft hands, his delicate touches. What can that mean, Mr Smith, that I am spoken for?

I hardly know.

I traced where he had touched me with my own fingers, and then closed my eyes, let my hands sink beneath the water.

It was another long bath.

A man needs them, from time to time.

Yours,

Ganymede Cavendish

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in more of my work, [Click here!](https://johannesevans.tumblr.com/post/629449536272826368/landing-page)
> 
> Please remember to comment!


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